Spam email is named for a Monty Python sketch
Vikings chanted 'Spam, Spam, Spam' until conversation drowned. Usenet users meant the same thing.
The Monty Python "Spam" sketch aired on BBC1 on 15 December 1970, episode 25. A couple enters a café whose menu is overwhelmingly Spam — the canned pork product. Vikings in the corner break into a chant of "Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam," drowning out all conversation. The joke is the inescapability.
In the late 1980s, players of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) used "spam" as a verb for flooding chat — typing the word over and over to scroll an opponent's screen off. The term migrated to Usenet for off-topic mass posts. The early defining incident was Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel's "Green Card" post on April 12, 1994: a pair of Phoenix lawyers blasted an immigration-services ad to roughly 6,000 Usenet newsgroups, the first commercial spam at scale. The backlash was immediate and the name was already in place.
Hormel Foods Corporation, which has made the actual canned product since 1937, eventually accepted the linguistic loss. They ask only that "SPAM" the meat be capitalized, and "spam" the email be lowercase.
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