This term occurred to me a year or so after I began my current job. (Apparently, I wasn't the only one to put the words spam and tantrum together. But I can't find any other recorded entries with this particular definition.) For reasons which I still don't understand, a certain minority of people take spam very personally. Occasionally, we have someone who threatens to report every single copy of spam of they receive until we can "make it stop".
Yes, spam is annoying and occasionally offensive. But you're probably spending too much mental energy on it. In most cases, the easiest thing to do is delete it. If you want to know when to report it, here's a decision tree that covers the most common cases.
The truth is that spam is not the number one computer security issue. It probably doesn't even rank in the top five. Next time you feel the urge to pen an angry rant to your email provider about spam, check to see if your copy of Adobe Acrobat reader is up to date. Unpatched software puts you at a much greater risk than most spam emails and is an easy problem to solve.
Spam is a pernicious problem for a few reasons. The first is that email is so cheap to send that spammers don't have to succeed very often for the costs to justify the benefits. Nobody would bother to send out spam selling viagra if there weren't a few people in the world who purchase viagra from spam.
The second reason is that the sources of spam are difficult to eliminate. Even if you do find the source, there's no guarantee that the spammers are still using that particular account or computer. You know that classic game whack-a-mole where you keep hitting the mole and it just pops up in another place? It's like that. To further complicate things, sometimes the sources are places that don't care if they're sending spam or not. You can complain to that corrupt ISP in Ukraine until you're blue in the face, they're not going to stop.
The third reason is that it's hard to teach a computer to recognize spam. This post mentions the word 'viagra' twice (now three times). Does that make something spam? Well, maybe. Unless this is a medical article. Or maybe you have a genuine prescription for viagra (four times) and it's your pharmacy sending you a refill reminder.
So next time you're tempted to throw a spamtrum please cut the person on the end a little bit of slack. It's a hard problem. Email providers all over the world are doing their best to solve it. And you could channel your energy into much more fruitful, cheerful endeavors. Like baking cookies. Everyone likes cookies.
