Support : Glossary

Glossary

Our online glossary of terms allows you to understand our email and internet specific jargon. If there is any term that you are not familiar with and would like added to the glossary please contact support with the request.

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SPAM

Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers.

There is some debate about the source of the term, but the generally accepted version is that it comes from the Monty Python song, "Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam?" Like the song, spam is an endless repetition of worthless text. Another school of thought maintains that it comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunchmeat Spam:

• Nobody wants it or ever asks for it.
• No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree.
• Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people.

Sender Email Addresses

TMDA can also tag your messages with a sender address which is an e-mail address that only a certain sender can use.

Here is an example sender address:

jason-sender-a751af@safeaddress.com

This particular sender address will only accept messages from president@whitehouse.gov. Other messages must go through the confirmation process. Sender addresses can also be generated to accept mail from any sender at a given domain.

Sender addresses are often used to subscribe to mailing lists. This way, you don't have to worry that the subscription list might get harvested by spammers since only the mailing list software will be able to send messages there. The address to use can be found in the Return-Path header of a mailing list message (e.g, subscribe to the Python list with a sender address based upon python-list-admin@python.org).