The Origins of SPAM

29 posted on October 29, 2009

POSTED IN: Blog Posts, Culture, Technology, Videos

Every morning our email inboxes are laden with it (depending on how good of a spam filter you have) and now even our Facebook and Twitter accounts are plagued with these unwanted messages about teeth whitening and increasing the size of your…well, you know.

Ever wonder where the term SPAM came from? I mean, we all know that there’s a canned meat with the same name but what’s the connection? According to the Internet Society and other sources, the term spam is derived from the 1970 SPAM sketch on the comedy series “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”

The sketch is set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes SPAM canned luncheon meat. As the waiter recites the SPAM-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating “SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM… lovely SPAM! wonderful SPAM!”, hence “SPAMming” the dialogue. The basic concept of being “spammed” (receiving tons of unwanted email) owes it’s origin to the couple in the cafe who couldn’t order anything on the menu without getting varying amounts of the unwanted canned meat along with their order.

The 1970 Monty Python SPAM Sketch

So the next time you open your inbox and see 239 emails you didn’t ask for, you’ll be hearing those Vikings singing their spam song as you delete away.

How much spam do you get in your email inbox on an average day?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Blog Posts, Culture, Technology, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Comments

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October 29, 2009

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1 Brook Sarver said:

After burning through several email addresses due to SPAM, I’ve gone to great lengths keeping my main email address clean.

What SPAM does get through (usually about 20 or so messages/day) almost always gets filtered into the SPAM folder. Thanks Gmail! All random, online website sign-ups gets done with a secondary email address as to keep spam away…

I had never seen that Monty Python clip before! Too funny!
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October 29, 2009

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2 Nick said:

It depends on the account. I have my info account for my domain that I use on all blogs and to sign up for accounts and then I have my personal account, the personal account stays relatively clean.
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October 30, 2009

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3 sTim said:

It makes me feel very old to think some people don’t know the origin of the term. And nerdy. Never a good combination, even in my line of work!
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October 6, 2010

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4 Maria Rogers said:

the best teeth whitening agents are still based on peroxides.;~