SPAM Email

1173 Words3 Pages

SPICEY PORK AND e-MAIL

Anyone who "SPAMS" as a marketing technique should be forced to sit at a computer and experience the utter agony that is receiving SPAM email. In the past week I have received over 105 emails to my AOL account. Out of the 105 emails, only one was a "real" email from an actual person, the rest: SPAM! This problem must be happening to others, so why hasn't something been done to outlaw this annoying junk email? Who is the evil mastermind behind this so-called "SPAM"? Who is it, so I can find them and make sure they never touch a computer again! "Spamming" should be a crime.

What is SPAM? "SPAM", in its original definition, means "spiced pork and meat", a disgusting canned substance that originated in the 1930's. Today, SPAM is more commonly thought of as the annoying junk email we get everyday asking us to "re-finance your home" or "visit my webcam". Michael D. Sofka, of the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, states many definitions for SPAM, the most pertinent and obvious being simply: "Mass, Unsolicited Commercial Email" (1). According to Spam expert Brad Templeton, mass unsolicited email was first coined as "Spam" in April of 1994. Two lawyers named Canter and Siegel hired a programmer to write a program script that would post the lawyers' advertisement to thousands of newsgroups on "USENET", which is the world's largest online conferencing center, (or at least was at the time). Templeton says that this act was termed "Spam" from an old Monty Python skit, in which "a restaurant serves all of its food with lots of Spam, and the waitress repeats the word several times in describing how much spam is in the items. When she does this, a group of Vikings in the corner start a song: "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!" Until told to shut up." (2). Because of how repetitive and annoying the word "Spam" became in the skit, a few people started calling these annoying and repetitive emails "SPAM". The name stuck, and to this day junk email is still called Spam. These annoying emails were originally intended as a marketing ploy, simply to get a company's message out to as many people as possible. Now they are so annoying, I can honestly say that Spam is the absolute worst way to get your message across; these junk emails are never read, only deleted.

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