Spam

Also known as unsolicited commercial email (UCE). No one refers to UCE.

If Gmail started referring to an unsolicited commercial email folder, everyone would switch overnight to Yahoo Mail. Yahoo has since lost the right to use its exclamation point. I wrote it as Yahoo! for so many years and am relieved I no longer need to stretch my fingers and make that gratuitous punctuation mark. Then again, for people who have been writing about the internet and marketing for many years dating back to the 1990s, most of us need to write Yahoo far less often anyway.

This author has never eaten Spam, so I’m not sure if it leaves as bad a taste in one’s mouth as spam does figuratively. However, I suspect that if spam filters became 100% accurate and effective, and all spam disappeared from the world, many people would miss it. It’s like the bug bite that annoyed you but that you miss scratching.