Spam: Named After a Monty Python Sketch
Zusammenfassung
The word “spam” for unwanted email was coined in the early 1990s, borrowed from a 1970 Monty Python sketch in which a café offers a menu where every item includes SPAM (the canned meat product), with a Viking chorus repeatedly chanting “SPAM, SPAM, SPAM” until all other conversation is drowned out. In the sketch, the word overwhelms everything else — exactly as unsolicited email overwhelms wanted messages in an inbox. The term was in use in Usenet and bulletin board communities by the early 1990s; it described mass-posting of the same message to multiple forums before it was applied to email specifically.
The Monty Python Sketch
The Monty Python sketch “Spam” aired on the BBC’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970 (Series 2, Episode 12). The setting is a café where the menu includes: “Egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and Spam; egg, bacon and Spam; egg, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam…” A customer who doesn’t want Spam cannot avoid it — every item includes it. A chorus of Vikings periodically interrupts to sing “Spam, spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam.”
The sketch works as satire of mass-produced convenience food that pervades the post-war British diet. The comedy comes from the word’s relentless repetition overwhelming all other content — a perfect metaphor for commercial messages that overwhelm desired content, though this application was not the sketch’s intent.
The Digital Usage
The earliest documented use of “spam” in computing contexts appears in multi-user online games (MUDs) and Usenet in the early 1990s. The specific application varied:
- Flooding: Sending large amounts of irrelevant text to a chat room or forum to make it unreadable.
- Repeat posting: Posting the same message to many different Usenet newsgroups.
- Commercial solicitation: Sending unsolicited advertising to email lists.
The first large-scale commercial email spam is generally attributed to Canter and Siegel, two immigration lawyers who sent an advertisement for their services to approximately 6,000 Usenet newsgroups on April 12, 1994. The message, offering to help with the US green card lottery, is considered the event that moved “spam” from subculture jargon to a term requiring mainstream explanation.
The Scale of the Problem
By 2008, approximately 97% of all email sent on the internet was spam. Major email providers deployed increasingly sophisticated filtering to remove it before delivery; most users never see the volume that their spam filters intercept. Industry estimates suggest approximately 45 billion spam emails are sent per day in 2024.
The spam problem drove the development of multiple technologies: Bayesian filtering (Paul Graham’s 2002 paper “A Plan for Spam” popularized probabilistic spam detection), SPF/DKIM/DMARC email authentication standards, and the reputation systems used by email providers to block known spam sources.
The connection between spam and Monty Python also influenced Python’s variable naming conventions: spam, ham (wanted email), and eggs are the standard Python placeholder names, directly referencing both the spam filtering problem (ham vs. spam) and the Monty Python origin.