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Re: [Asrg] Another criteria for "what is spam"...

At 07:33 PM 6/3/2003 -0400, you wrote:


I've been thinking about the various definitions of "spam" and thought
of another criteria which isn't necessarily mutually exclusive but
captures something important:

  Spam is e-mail from a source which is hard to impossible for
  the recipient to stop and/or reasonably prevent from receiving.
I think it would be important to note that it is AUTOMATED.

For example, if I get a letter from someone who thinks that because of my business, that they have a tool that I might be interested in and if they have typed the e-mail themselves and sent it to me then as far as I'm concerned it is OK. It is OK even if I'm not interested in their product. The fact of the matter is that they actually took the time (e.g., economic cost) to sort out who they were going to send their letter to and that they sent it to me based on their judgement that it was actually relevant to me.

However, much (most) spam is not targeted specifically and we get so much of it that it is overwhelming. Personally, I don't think that it is spam in itself that is so much the problem as is the fact that it is not targeted and we are all overwhelmed with it. (I get several hundred per-day that I have to sort through.)

For example, if those of us who are programmers were provided with a single e-mail that advertised a C/C++ compiler that compiled what you meant rather than what you typed (and it actually worked) for those of us who are programmer's it would probably be greatly appreciated. Why would it be appreciated? Because it would have great bearing on our business and it would save lots of time and money. But if we received 1,000 of these it wouldn't be appreciated nor would advertisements for underwear (even though most people wear underwear -- making it relevant but not very relevant).

The key to all this is the economic cost either in time or money or ... that the sender went through to send it. When there is no economic cost then we end up with a runaway situation such as it is today.

So, as mentioned before, I think the AUTOMATED word needs to be there though I can easily envision where mail sent in an automated fashion.

Also, one problem with your definition is that given a hypothetical situation where everybody actually unsubscribed you if you unsubscribed, there are too many potential mailing lists (one for each company world wide) that one would have to unsubscribe to in order to even fractionally reduce the amount of spam received. (This is of course, ignoring the fact that there are a few spammers that send most of the spam.)

I don't mind people sending me something that is actually relevant to my wants and needs and I know it has been carefully considered and that someone on the other end actually took the time to compose a letter and send it to me. I do mind getting inundated with tons (if bits can be measured that way) of irrelevant crap.

-Art
--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.

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