spamming

Pluralspammings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The practice of sending unwanted email to people who did not request it.

   Like a stranger slipping flyers under every door in a building, whether the residents want them or not.

   Spamming drives up the cost of running an email service.

   Persistent spamming eventually got the account permanently banned.

   Note

   An Internet word for the activity rather than its product. Spam is the junk itself, and spamming is the sending of it. It usually names the practice as a whole and takes no plural. It can also count single episodes: Joel Dubin's The Little Black Book of Computer Security (2005) warns that a reply keeps an address alive "for future spammings."

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of spam.

   The bot is spamming the forum with thousands of identical posts.

   Moderators warned the user who was spamming the comment section.

   Note

   The -ing form doubles the final consonant, so spam becomes spamming. It works with or without an object: someone can simply be spamming, or be spamming a forum or a person. It also stretches beyond messages to the broad sense of doing something rapidly and over and over. Used as a gerund, it shades into the noun for the practice.

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