Author: Roger D Davis
Date: 21:27:23 06/28/02
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On June 28, 2002 at 19:02:32, Robin Smith wrote: >On June 28, 2002 at 13:19:03, Roger D Davis wrote: > >>Spam is ANY unsolicited email with a commercial purpose. Spam is not about time, >>but about boundaries. No one has a right to invade your email box without your >>permission, regardless of how few seconds it takes to delete the post. Anyone >>who unilaterally assumes that their unsolicited email represents information is >>guilty of presumption, and will provoke controversy. >> >>Roger > >Your definition of spam is very unique. "Any unsolicited email with a >commercial purpose". Wow. Since people virtually never "solicit" commecial >e-mails this might just as well be "any e-mail with a commercial purpose". This >definition of spam is also not what is generally provided at anti-spam sites. >See for example the link provided by Sune Fischer (as an agument against the ICD >e-mail??): > >http://spam.abuse.net/overview/whatisspam.shtml > >I really detest spam. But for me the ICD e-mail was NOT spam. It was missing >an essential element of what, for me, constitutes spam: > >It was not sent to a mass mailing list of people 99.999+% of whom could care >less about the content. In fact it was VERY carefully targeted towards people >who had a VERY HIGH likelyhood of being interested. > >-R You have to distinguish between features that are probablistically present and those that are essential to a definition. In the link you sent on, the definition of spam is even broader than mine: "Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising..." In this definition, ANY email you did not CHOOSE to receive is spam...the fact that most Spam is commericial is a probabilistic, but not constant feature. Accordingly, the definition in your link is even less restrictive. Note, however, that the definition offered in your link does feature user choice, while mine mentions "boundaries." So my definition is hardly unique. Moreover, no where in the link that you sent on does it say, "If the sender is a good guesser about what the receiver might like to receive, and he does so with 95% accuracy, then it's not spam." So while 95% or more of the users here might be grateful about ICD's email, including me, it is still spam. If ANY users here received unsolicited email from ICD, then they were spammed, and it is just that simple. Regardless of loyalties to ICD, a spade is a spade. Roger
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