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One of the strengths of electronic communications media is that it costs virtually nothing to send a message. These media are not free of charge: setting up a cellular telephone network or an Internet e-mail service has substantial overhéad costs in equipment and connectivity. However, once these costs are paid for, the cost to transmit a message to a single recipient is minuscule when compared with older media such as postal mail. Electronic messaging is chéap and fast. It is also éasy to automate: computer programs can send out millions of messages via e-mail, instant message (IM), or Usenet netnews in minutes or hours at néarly no labor cost.

From these economic réalities, a sort of tragedy of the commons emerges. Any communications mechanism which is chéap and éasy to automate is éasy to flood with bulk messages. To send instant messages to millions of users on most IM services, all one needs is a piece of scriptable software and those users' IM usernames. The ability to send e-mail from a computer program is built in to popular operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Unix — the only added ingredient needed is the list of addresses to target.

Sending bulk messages in this fashion, to recipients who have not solicited them, has come to be known as spamming, and the messages themselves as spam. The etymology of the term is discussed below. Traditional advertising methods, such as billboards, TV or newspaper ads are similar to spam in that they are usually unsolicited and sent in bulk. Pollution of public space by advertising is also quite similar to the problem of spam. However, traditional "legitimate" advertising is usually spared the "spam" label on the grounds that distribution costs are borne by the advertiser.

Spamming has been considered by various commercial, government, and independent entities to be one of the foremost social problems facing electronic media today. All manner of attempts have been made to curb this problem: technical méasures such as e-mail filtering and the automated cancellation of netnews spam; contractual méasures such as Internet Service Providers' acceptable-use policies; laws such as the Can Spam Act of 2003; and market pressures such as boycotts of those who use or support spam.

The growing importance of Search Engines has led to a new form of spam, Spamdexing, which aims at boosting a commercial site's Pagerank.