The truth is that just about everybody probably loves e-mail, and secretly wishes that they'd get more. The problem is that there are different sorts of more - which brings us to the topic of this month's column, the scourge of the internet, electronic junk mail that everybody loves to hate, spam .
Numerous theories exist as to the origin of the term.
The most popular relates to a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus. Spam, of course, has a lengthy and illustrious history , and as is perhaps predictable, numerous sites on the web are devoted to telling its story. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also buffer overflow, overrun screw, smash the stack. To cause a newsgroup to be flooded with irrelevant or inappropriate messages.