RE: [Asrg] criteria for spam V2

Spam is a 'personal' experience no matter how you slice it.  I get a message
in my inbox that I didn't want to receive.  Like consciousness, I only know
that I received it, even if others have it.  It doesn't matter if I was the
only one who received it.  It's Spam.  If it was sent to 10,000 people and
I'm the only one who didn't want it, it's Spam to me, but not to the 9,999
other folks who wanted it. So Spam is 'personal'.  My Spam is not
necessarily your Spam.  To make it so would be unconstitutional to say the
least.

So I stick to my definition of Spam as being "unwanted email."  It's just
that simple and there is no need to complicate it in an effort to address it
as a problem.

The issue as I see is how do I stop getting these "unwanted email" messages
from getting in my inbox.  Using the 80-20 rule, if one were to inhibit
'unsolicited bulk commercial email' from being sent out over the Internet,
we'd address the problem 80% of the time.  That's a great start to
addressing my desire to eliminate "unwanted email' messages from cluttering
my inbox and reducing my productivity not to mention my usage of disk space
and Internet connect time when traveling.

I use 'unsolicited' because if I allow a direct marketer to send me email
then that's ok, it's not Spam.  And I believe the vast majority of email
users would concur.

In opposition to what is stated below, all 'bulk' email is not Spam.  My
e-journals and this mailing list are not considered Spam.

It just doesn't make sense in a market economy to cut off the ability to
contact willing individuals en masse to entice them to buy something.
Otherwise we'd be eliminating billboards, direct mail, tv commercials, etc.
The issue is really to protect the rights of those individuals who don't
want to be contacted.

And now it's time to slay the 'unsolicited bulk commercial email'
dragon.....

Howard Roth

-----Original Message-----
From: asrg-admin@ietf.org [mailto:asrg-admin@ietf.org]On Behalf Of Barry
Shein
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 9:20 PM
To: hroth@tngi.com
Cc: asrg@ietf.org
Subject: RE: [Asrg] criteria for spam V2

Something which keeps coming up in these definitional attempts is that
we seem to go around and around spam as being a personal and/or group
experience.

"Bulk" is a group experience, I only know it is "bulk" because a lot
of other people received it. When I look at one msg on the screen I
have no idea if anyone else received it.

"Unsolicited" is a personal experience. You may've signed up for
information about body part enlargement, and I haven't, doesn't matter
if it's bulk, for me it's spam, for you it isn't (using the common
definitions of this group, forget my more draconian definitions for
the moment), same msg, same sender.

And of course when people talk about "unwanted" they mostly are in the
realm of personal experience, somewhere along one's outrage scale.

I once termed this "solicitations for products I certainly don't want
anyone else to think I requested!"

I know, dialectic can be tedious; it's more fun to just charge forward
and begin slaying the dragon. But I think we're rushing headlong into
semantics and definitions w/o a lot of (disciplined) thought.

--
        -Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die    | bzs@TheWorld.com           |
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