It's a luncheon meat, kinda pink, comes in a can, made by Hormel. Most Americans intuitively, viscerally associate "Spam" with "no nutritive or aesthetic value," though it is still relatively popular (especially in Hawaii) and can be found in almost any grocery store.) The canned luncheon meat has its own newsgroup, alt.spam.
The term "spam," as used on this newsgroup, means "the same article (or essentially the same article) posted an unacceptably high number of times to one or more newsgroups." CONTENT IS IRRELEVANT. 'Spam' doesn't mean "ads." It doesn't mean "abuse." It doesn't mean "posts whose content I object to." Spam is a funky name for a phenomenon that can be measured pretty objectively: did that post appear X times? (See 3.1, "Yeah, but how many is X?')
There have been "customized" spams where each post made some effort to apply to each individual newsgroup, but the general thrust of each article was the same. A huge straw poll on news.admin.policy, news.admin.misc, and alt.current-events.net-abuse (December 1994) showed that as many of 90% of the readers felt that cancellations for these posts were justified. So, simply put: if you plan to post the same or extremely similar messages to dozens of newsgroups, the posts are probably going to get cancelled.
