> Spam specifically means (at least originally) so much unwanted traffic that it overwhelms legitimate traffic.
I guess what today is more commonly known as DOS (or even DDOS sometimes, even if it isn't actually "distributed" per se, for some reason).
I did know about the name since before, but not the original meaning, so cheers for the explanation :)
I'd still say DOS is a little different because it's the server that can't tell what's valid; to the human, in that situation, if their request eventually completes then it's definitely their data coming back, it just completes slowly or not at all. With spam, it's a human wading through junk to find valid data.