Joel K. "Jay" Furr (born 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia) is an American writer and software trainer, notable as a Usenet personality in the early and mid-1990s.

According to Brad Templeton, Furr is one of the earliest people to refer to unsolicited electronic messages as "spam".

Furr used the term in the Usenet newsgroup news.admin.policy to describe an out-of-control automated robo-moderation system known as ARMM.

While he didn't coin the phrase, he appears to have been the first to use it to describe the phenomenon as it applied to USENET newsgroups.

Furr created a line of Usenet kook T-shirts, which included a "Serdar Argic World Tour" shirt as well as one imprinted with the programming code for RSA encryption, boasting "This shirt is a munition", a reference to US export law.