In 1936, canned meat pioneer Jay C. Hormel sponsored a contest to find a name for his company’s new spiced ham product. The winner of the grand prize of $100 was Kenneth Daigneau (brother of the company’s vice president), who combined the “sp-” from “spiced” and the “-am” from ham (cf. turducken).

In 1970, an episode of the BBC show Monty Python’s Flying Circus included a skit in which every item on a Viking cafe’s menu included this same spiced ham product. During the skit, the establishment’s patrons broke into a song whose refrain was a seemingly endless repetition of the product’s name.

In the 1980s, history is foggy but it seems that proto-chat rooms saw the lyrics of the Monty Python song posted in full, repeatedly. For computer geeks (most of the people using proto-chat rooms in the 1980s) the name of the spiced ham product became synonymous with mass repetition. Programmers took to using the term to mean overrunning a computer’s memory with too much data.

In 1994, lawyer Larry Canter flooded early Internet message boards with an advertising message in what was reportedly the first use of the Internet for mass marketing. One angry recipient supposedly posted a message suggesting that every recipient of the ad send a can of a certain spiced meat product to Canter in protest.

In 2008, people are resigned to receiving a ton of unwanted email. However, there are ways to get rid of spam… for the most part. Here’s how….

1. Don’t just give away your email address to everyone! Please don’t sign up for the email foreclosure listing with your real email address. No, No, NO. Use a spam email address. Just go to gmail or yahoo and sign up. Don’t know how? Better buy the bundle to learn it all now. (selfless bundle plug). Anyway, just use that email address to sign up with unknown online vendors, ecards, etc. Or get yourself a new email address and start with a nice spam-free fresh slate.
2. Use the Antispam feature on your email service to flag things as spam and help us all. You flag it as spam on email, I flag it as spam, Jim in Canada flags it as spam… pretty soon the tool learns that it’s spam and Julie in Seattle doesn’t ever get the spam. Make sense? You can also just flag it on your own email software (like Outlook or Thunderbird) Outlook has a “junk mail” feature that is ok, but we like Thunderbird better. It has a great “learn” tool that pretty much eliminates spam after you teach it for awhile. Download it and then check out the spam tool how to here or here. (or buy our bundleJ ).
3. Unplug your computer, move to Hawaii, and eat lots of spam (they really like spam over there). That will solve your spam problem but might create some other ones.P.S. Todd likes spiced ham luncheon meat … and old radio jingles promoting it:
   http://www.spam.com/assets/it/au/jingle.au

Last Links

• Gmail email sign up page here. We like gmail, nice as a secondary spam email for all those shady signups too.
• PC Magazine AntiSpam section (lots of good software but it may be harder to use than the steps above.
• Thunderbird- It’s free, fast as a bird, with a thunderous personality… actually not really, but we do like it!
• Best Sushi in Hawaii (for when you get tired of the spam) Kintaro, in Kapaa, Kauai. Or the Kilauea Fish Market if you’re up in Kilauea… oh yummy.

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