How a canned meat brand ended up naming your junk folder

Hormel Foods has never sent a single unwanted marketing email in its history. It has also, indirectly and by total accident, given its name to more than half the email traffic on the planet. Nobody at the company chose that, no one at the company likes it, and the actual path from “canned pork shoulder” to “the thing filling your junk folder” runs through a British sketch comedy troupe and an argument on a Usenet newsgroup. It’s a much stranger story than most people assume, and it ends somewhere very concrete: an act of the US Congress with real financial teeth.

The meat came first, by decades

Spam — the food — was invented by Hormel in 1937, a contraction of “spiced ham” credited to Kenneth Daigneau, who won a company naming contest. It became a cultural fixture during World War II, shipped by the millions of pounds to feed Allied troops. None of that has anything to do with junk email. The food brand did nothing wrong — it was just already famous when comedy needed a word to repeat.

The Vikings did it

In 1970, the British sketch group Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired a sketch set in a café where every single item on the menu contained Spam — “egg and spam, egg bacon and spam, egg bacon sausage and spam” — while a group of Vikings in the corner broke into a chorus that just repeated the word “spam” over and over, drowning out the other actors’ dialogue entirely. The joke was pure repetition: an unavoidable, overwhelming word crowding out everything else you were trying to hear.

That’s the exact shape of the metaphor early internet users reached for a couple of decades later, once message boards and chat rooms started getting flooded with the same repeated, unwanted text. The earliest documented use of “spam” in something close to its modern computing sense dates to early 1990s Usenet and IRC culture — a flood of repetitive, unwanted postings, named for the sketch because it was the same shape: one thing repeated past the point of usefulness, crowding out the actual conversation. It wasn’t a marketing term yet. It was a joke about annoyance, borrowed from a joke about annoyance.

The moment it stopped being a joke: April 12, 1994

The word had a home before it had a true villain. That arrived courtesy of Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, a husband-and-wife immigration law firm in Phoenix, Arizona. On April 12, 1994, they posted an advertisement for their green-card lottery legal services to roughly 5,500 Usenet newsgroups simultaneously — nearly every active group on the network at the time, regardless of topic. It became known instantly as the “Green Card spam,” and it is widely credited as the event that took “spam” from an inside joke among a relatively small population of internet users to the universally understood name for unsolicited commercial messaging, email included.

The reaction was immediate and furious — mass complaints, attempts to flood the firm’s own inbox in retaliation, angry newsgroup threads that outlasted the original posting by years. Canter and Siegel weren’t apologetic about it, either; they described their tactic in almost promotional terms, treating the backlash as proof it worked. That reaction is why the incident stuck in internet folk memory as the origin event — not the first unsolicited message ever (that predates it by 16 years, a 1978 promotional email to 393 ARPANET addresses, a story in its own right), but the first one brazen enough that an entire online culture agreed, at once, on what to call the problem.

By 1998, “spam” had entered the New Oxford Dictionary of English as a recognized word for unsolicited bulk electronic messages. The metaphor had fully replaced the joke it started as.

From a shared insult to a federal law

A word catching on doesn’t fix anything by itself. Through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, unsolicited commercial email grew from an annoyance into something closer to a structural threat to email as a usable medium — by some estimates, spam made up close to half of all email traffic by the early 2000s, and inboxes without any filtering became close to unusable. Individual states had started passing their own anti-spam laws, each with different rules, which created a real practical mess for any business trying to send legitimate commercial email across state lines.

Congress responded with the CAN-SPAM Act — its actual name, a strained backronym for “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act.” Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden introduced the bill in April 2003; it passed the Senate 97–0 in October and the House 392–5 in November — a rare piece of legislation with almost no organized opposition, because by 2003 there was broad, bipartisan agreement that the status quo had become untenable. President George W. Bush signed it into law on December 16, 2003, and it took effect January 1, 2004, establishing the first national US standard for commercial email and putting enforcement in the hands of the Federal Trade Commission.

The compromise nobody fully loves

Here’s the part that surprises people who assume CAN-SPAM banned spam: it didn’t. CAN-SPAM is an opt-out law, not an opt-in one. It doesn’t require a business to get your permission before emailing you — it requires that, once you tell them to stop, they actually stop, quickly, and that the message wasn’t deceptive about who sent it or what it was. That’s a meaningfully lower bar than the regime the EU eventually adopted (broadly opt-in, requiring consent up front) or Canada’s CASL in 2014 (also opt-in-by-default) — a comparison worth reading in full if you send across borders. Critics have argued for two decades that CAN-SPAM’s business-friendly design is precisely why “technically legal” commercial email volume kept climbing after 2003 instead of shrinking — the law targeted deception and unresponsiveness to opt-outs, not the base rate of unsolicited sending itself.

What it did do was give the FTC real enforcement teeth and set a floor no legitimate sender in the US can legally go under: honest headers, honest subject lines, a working opt-out mechanism, and a physical postal address in every commercial message. What that floor actually requires today, line by line, is covered here — this piece is about how we got the law in the first place, not what it demands of a modern sender.

Why the etymology still matters

It’s a fun fact that Spam the meat has nothing to do with the problem named after it. The deeper reason the history is worth knowing is the pattern it reveals: a genuinely useful, open technology gets exploited at scale, the exploitation gets a name because people need a shared word for it, and the naming pressure eventually turns into legal pressure once volume crosses a threshold society won’t tolerate. That pattern didn’t stop in 2003 — it’s the same one behind Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 bulk-sender mandates.

The lesson for anyone sending outreach in 2026 isn’t “the word is funny.” It’s that email’s entire regulatory and reputation apparatus exists because senders, for years, treated “technically legal” as the whole bar. Norbelys is built around clearing a higher one: unsubscribes are enforced automatically and platform-wide, sender identity is verified before a message can go out, and spam-complaint rates are watched continuously rather than checked after the damage is already done. That’s the difference between being the kind of sender the 1994 Green Card spam made everyone fear, and the kind that gets to keep sending. See how Norbelys keeps every send compliant by default and start a campaign that never needs a law to keep it honest.