= 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 e-mail.  The use of the word "Ham", on the other hand, is relatively new and
sometimes confusing.

"Ham" is ''e-mail that is 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
[[http://spambayes.sf.net/|SpamBayes]], the Python probabilistic classifier.