[pmmail-list] Spam -- your definition

[Richard Grevers]

On Thu, 30 May 2002 11:00:24 -0300, PMMail OS/2 Support wrote:

>On Thu, 30 May 2002 09:52:06 +0100, Brian Morrison wrote:
>
>>Since I loathe html mail (and spam, which most of it is) 
>
>This reminded me of something I have been pondering on lately. What
>is your (each of you) definition of "spam"?
>
>I believe that the world Internet community is making a potentially
>dangerous "vague" use of the word "spam". Since words need commonly
>understood definitions to be useful (just like Internet standards,
>btw) it seems odd to me that people talk about "spam" as much as they
>do -- in fact, laws are even being passed about "spam" -- without any
>concrete, commonly understood or accepted definition.
>
>I know, many of us believe we know exactly what "spam" is, but the
>point is not does *one* of us have a definition, the point is, doe we
>*share* the definition?
>
>Examples: Some people say to me that *any* unsolicited email is
>"spam". This, to me, seems obviously ridiculous. If I send an email
>to someone saying that I saw them post about a computer problem and I
>was wondering if they ever found a solution, that's unsolicited
>contact. Should this be considered "spam"?
>
>Some people say any *bulk* email is "spam". If you send it to more
>than one person, you're a spammer. OK, what if you're looking for a
>job? You probably (if you're following common sense advice) send your
>resume -- by email these days -- to at least a handful, maybe up to a
>few hundred companies, who probably didn't ask you to do so. "Spam"?
>
>Some people say any unsolicited *commercial* email is "spam". OK,
>that seems easier to buy, but then why the furious response to these
>emails? Unsolicited commercial contact has been around in society for
>at least hundreds of years. People come to your door or call you on
>the phone and ask if you'll buy their products. They send you flyers
>in the mail or through other direct delivery methods, etc. Sure we
>don't love it, but most of us don't attempt to have those
>callers/mailers arrested and/or their businesses shut down because of
>it. In fact, North American business as we know it would likely be
>severely adversely affected (for at least the short term) if we
>suddenly outlawed unsolicited pitches in person, by phone, fax or
>postal mail.
>
>Some people say that "spam" is (1) unsolicited (2) bulk (3)
>commercial email that is (4) fraudulent and/or (5) does not contain
>any real contact info or method of demanding that the contact stop.
>Personally I like that definition because it gives us a target that
>we can all agree should be prevented.
>
>Which definition do you use?

BTW, what did you mean by "4) Fraudulent"?

1) Emails with fraudulent content (I've had a big upsurge in "Senior Officials in the
Nigerian Government" wanting access to my bank account recently, and it hasn't stoppped
despite a news story that the perpetrators of this fraud had been arrested.

2) Emails with fraudulent headers.
A couple of weeks ago I got about 40 bounces from AoL addresses where an address of mine 
(my main business one, unfortunately) had been forged as the reply-to for a porn site spam.
And this week I've received over a dozen copies of a particularly annoying (20kb, renders in
PMMail as black on navy blue thanks to the blank-header bug) spam with half a dozen different
forged from and reply-to addresses (Webmaster @ various .nz domains) The big risk of these is 
that some trigger-happy ISP won't check things properly and will kill the account of an innocent
victim.

-- 
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