The term "spam" has gone through quite a few meanings in the recent past. It once meant "buffer overflow" (to crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data -The New Hacker's Dictionary .) Recently, it has come to refer to mass mailings akin to junk-mail, either to news groups or electronic mail.
According to the the net-abuse-faq, the term "spam" refers to a
newsgroup article (or essentially the same article [with small changes],) posted an unacceptably high number times to one or more newsgroups. Content is irrelevant. "Spam" does not mean "ads." It doesn't mean "abuse." It doesn't mean "posts whose subject I object to."