What does the word "Ham" mean, in

...

the context

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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 side 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

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