What it means
اسپم (spam) is the Persian noun for spam: unsolicited bulk content, junk email, mass DMs, the inbox clutter no one asked for. The word covers the email sense (the original 1990s import) and every later extension: Telegram channel spam, Instagram bot DMs, WhatsApp forwards from your uncle, Tinder messages from accounts that did not read your bio.
The register is neutral-to-colloquial. اسپم has been in Persian long enough that almost every Iranian internet user knows it, regardless of age. It arrived with the first generation of Iranian email users in the late 1990s and never left.
How to use it
اسپم works as a noun the way it works in English: you have spam in your inbox, you mark something as spam, you receive spam, you block spam. It also forms a compound verb, اسپم زدن (spam-zadan, to spam someone), which gets its own entry.
email-am por-e spam shode.
My email is full of spam.
ایمیلم پر اسپم شده.
in dm-e spam-e, bazesh nakon.
This DM is spam, do not open it.
این دیام اسپمه، بازش نکن.
The early-loanword pattern
Spam belongs to a small group of early internet words that Persian absorbed before the Iranian internet had its own vocabulary: email, password, file, link, save, delete, login. These came in during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Iran was first getting dial-up access through ISPs like Pars Online and Neda Rayaneh. Persian did not coin native alternatives for most of them because the English words came packaged with the technology and there was no time to translate. The Farhangestan-e Zaban-e Farsi later proposed “هرزنامه” (harz-name, junk-letter) for spam, but the proposal stayed mostly on paper. Real users say اسپم.
The new shapes of spam
The Iranian internet has its own spam ecosystem. Telegram channels send mass referral codes for stock-tip groups. Instagram bots leave “Beautiful!” comments under every post. Iranian dating apps and Tinder are flooded with copy-paste opening lines. Hawkers on WhatsApp groups push unlicensed dietary supplements. The umbrella word for all of this is اسپم, and the volume is high enough that most Iranian users have a layer of spam-filtering reflexes built into how they use their phone.
In our voice
اسپم is the kind of word you learn in the first month of speaking Persian online. It is universal, no register issues, no political weight, just a piece of vocabulary that survived a quarter-century of Iranian internet and is going nowhere.
References
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