spam

Decades ago I worked with the team at MAPS (the world's first anti-spam company; "MAPS" is "SPAM" spelled backward, and we had it mean "Mail Abuse Prevention System") to work up a standard by which a given single e-mail message could be determined to be "spam" or not. This is because a lot of the people who wanted to send bulkish e-mail that nobody wanted to receive were just as cute as they could be about skirting definitions that involved streams of e-mail.