In general use,
"SPAM®"
is a brand name of luncheon meat and is a registered trademark of
Hormel Foods Corporation. After SPAM® was lampooned by
Monty Python in a famous sketch, it was jokingly adopted by the
Internet community to describe unsolicited mass postings across many
USENET groups. Soon, a new word was coined, the lowercase
"spam," a word that now describes
unsolicited, commercial email.
As you read this chapter, remember that spam is a moving target. On
the one hand, sendmail offers constantly
improving tools to filter and reject it. On the other hand, the
spammer's tools are constantly being updated to
bypass existing protections. Mix in the fact that laws are being
written which might modify or limit spam, and you can think of this
as an arms race. That is, you won't set up
sendmail just once and be done, but will find
yourself continually modifying database files and rule sets in an
effort to stay even with the spammer's cleverness.
