Hold The Spam, Please
By Michael Floyd
Amidst cries to do something about spamming, the Internet community has found an unlikely ally in, of all companies, Hormel Foods. This past July, lawyers from the company contacted Philadelphia-based Cyber Promotions and requested that it not use pictures of the canned meat product or the Spam name in its advertisements to promote their junk email service. Cyber Promotions, as you may recall, sued America Online for violating its right to free speech when the service provider attempted to block the junk emailer from spamming its seven million subscribers. After a much-publicized legal battle, it was ruled that private online services have a right to block unsolicited email solicitations.
Because spamming has achieved slang status and come to mean many things, I decided it was time to set the record straight. There are really two types of spam. The term originally sprang up on Usenet newsgroups to describe the excessive posting of the same message on multiple discussion groups. (The origin of the term is in dispute, although there are some entertaining stories floating around the Net.) Newsgroup spamming takes one of two forms -- Excessive Multi-Posting (EMP) and Excessive Cross-Posting (ECP). While both forms result in multiple postings, they affect the Net differently. Cross posting includes the address of all newsgroups on a single line, resulting in a single post on every news server around the world. EMP has a more widespread effect, because it individually addresses a message to each group, resulting in multiple posts (one for each individual discussion group) to the news server.<>
