Rabbinate Declares E-mail Spam Not Kosher

Jerusalem, August 22 – Israel’s two Chief Rabbis issued a joint ruling today that internet spam, like actual Spam™, is not kosher and must be properly purged before an inbox may be used again.

Spam, a pork product produced my the Hormel corporation, is by definition not kosher, as Torah law forbids the consumption of pig meat. Online spam, however, had so far eluded the strictures of Jewish law, a situation that Rabbis David Lau and Yitzhak Yosef sought to remedy with their latest pronouncement.

“Just as the Torah mandates that implements that have absorbed the flavor or forbidden substances be rid of those flavors using the heating process that caused the absorption, so must e-mail accounts that have been used to handle spam be purged,” said Rabbi Lau, who represents the Ashkenazi, or European, Jewish tradition. Non-kosher food boiled in a pot causes subsequent food cooked in that pot to be similarly forbidden, unless the pot has been boiled to remove the residual flavor. Utensils used with little or no moisture, by contrast, must be heated to white-hot before the absorbed flavors are considered gone.

“The procedure for purging a system of internet spam parallels that of actual Spam™,” said Rabbi Yosef, of the Sephardic communities, whose ancestors came largely from the Muslim world. “If, for example, spam has been burned onto a disk, the disk must undergo a complementary burning to remove the spam.” He said that he and the Rabbinical court would soon issue an addendum to the ruling, to clarify the necessary level of flaming on online forums that would render a web-enabled device permissible for further use.

Both Chief Rabbis emphasized that the purging procedure only works if the actual forbidden substance has been removed prior to the procedure, lest the heat only cause further absorption of the prohibited item’s flavor. So, too, must the offending spam be deleted from the drive or inbox, then sit unused 24 hours before purging.

Existing spam filters are by and large effective at keeping an inbox kosher, explains Rabbi Chumra Yetera of Congregation Minhag Shtut. “The inbox itself is generally kept separate from the non-kosher content,” he says. “But people have to be wary of the filters that allow everything in first, and only then perform the filtering. By then it’s too late, and the entire inbox must be emptied and purged before it may be used again.”

The Rabbis will soon take up an inquiry on whether the Universal Serial Bus must be segregated by sex.