Re: consent expression (was RE: [Asrg] ASRG next steps)

[Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>]

At 06:51 PM 3/4/2003 -0500, Paul Judge wrote:
> spam can not be expressed as a boolean
While I suspect the statement might be true, I would counsel you to avoid 
absolute statements this early in the game. They shut down exploration in 
the deprecated paths, research that might be of value.

If we can describe classes of traffic, such as perhaps providing keywords like

        PORN
        HUMOR
        OFFER-TO-SELL
        PERSONAL-MESSAGE
        TOPICAL-DISCUSSION
        OFFER-TO-ILLEGALLY-LAUNDER-EXCESS-NIGERIAN-CAPITAL-FOR-FUN-AND-PROFIT
        TROLL-FOR-INTEREST-IN-OFF-TOPIC-DISCUSSION

(well, maybe not the last two)

one could imagine people being able to identify their traffic correctly and 
being motivated to do so. While "you sent me unsolicited commercial email" 
is not an accusation (oops, statement) that can be objectively evaluated 
because the spammer might have a different definition of "solicit" than you 
do (those who spam me sure have a different definition than I do; they tell 
me I actually solicit this crap), the statement "this is a solicitation to 
view a web site containing material of an adult nature" is objective enough 
that folks who send them seem to be able to identify them - and mention the 
adult nature, the fact that they are 18, or various products such as 
NetNanny in the course of their solicitation.

Anyone who sees a need to include "to unsubscribe ___" or "I claim that you 
opted in because some mailer at the other end of the earth got loaded up 
with your email address" might find it in their interest to correctly 
describe the load they are offering. A mail relay server might, on that 
basis, only choose to handle traffic that claims to be of type 
TOPICAL-DISCUSSION, and might state in its mailing list description that 
the filter was being applied, or might include a note to that effect in its 
bounce message.

You still have the question of whether folks sending traffic of type PORN 
might decide that their mail is always TOPICAL-DISCUSSION, but I suspect 
that we will always have the problem of non-cooperative senders of mail.

What I have in mind, of course, is something similar to what Dan Bernstein 
does - if you send him an email, you will get a very obnoxious note that 
says "if you really want to dent my consciousness, you need to send your 
email again and tell me that you will pay me $250 if I read it and decide 
it is spam." But what I would propose is some form of system in which you 
describe the contents of the email in terms that a boolean filter (a filter 
that applies a boolean expression and does something if it is true and 
something else if it is false) can evaluate. What is needed is a vocabulary 
of message types. 
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