What does the word "Ham" mean, in

...

the context

...

of anti-spam?

Nowadays, it's likely that everyone knows what Spam means, in the context of Wiki MarkupProbably everybody knows these days what \["Spam"\] means in the context of e-mail. The use of the word "Ham ", on the other hand , is relatively new and sometimes confusing. Wiki Markup

"Ham" is e-mail that is not \["Spam"\], more or less the "good" mail. Previously it was often called non-spam or solicited mail. Because these words are both a bit long-winded, somebody came up with the catchy word Ham.

Editorial notes:

• Can somebody please wordsmith this text a bit?
• Who was it who first introduced the word Ham, does somebody have a link?
  

Thanks, MalteStretz

I gave it a quick touch-up, but it isn't polished yet.
SidneyMarkowitz

not Spam. In other words, "non-spam", or "good mail". It should be considered a shorter, snappier synonym for "non-spam".

Its usage is particularly common among anti-spam software developers, and not widely known elsewhere; in general it is probably better to use the term "non-spam", instead.

Etymology

The word was coined sometime in 2001 or 2002, by the guys working on SpamBayes, the Python probabilistic classifier.Using 'ham' for non-SPAM mail is extremely irritating. It reminds of the word 'harm' so that everybody would think of 'ham mail' as some new kind of SPAM in the first place. It shouldn't be used here!
lee