The term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where everything on the menu includes SPAM® luncheon meat. While a customer plaintively asks for some kind of food without SPAM in it, the server reiterates the SPAM-filled menu. Soon, a chorus of Vikings join in with a song: "SPAM, SPAM, wonderful SPAM, glorious SPAM," over and over again, drowning out all conversation.

Although the first known instance of unsolicited commercial email occurred in 1978, the term "spam" for this practice had not yet been applied. The Monty Python reference was applied to disruptive activity on MUD games. It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting -- the repeated posting of the same message. The first evident usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath of the ARMM incident of March 31, 1993, in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup.

Soon, it came to refer also to the flooding of Usenet newsgroups with junk messages. After a pair of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, started using bulk Usenet posting as a means of advertisement, the term came to include unauthorized commercial use of the noncommercial Usenet. Email spamming, and the use of the term, followed shortly. [3]

There are two popular (and incorrect) folk etymologies of the word "spam". The first, promulgated by spammers Canter & Siegel, is that "spamming" is what happens when one dumps a can of SPAM into a fan blade. The second is the acronym "shit posing as mail."

Hormel Foods, the makers of SPAM® luncheon meat, do not object to the Internet use of the term "spamming." However, they do ask that the capitalized word "SPAM" be reserved to refer to their product and trademark. [4].