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

> From: Art Pollard <pollarda@lextek.com>

> ...
> >   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.
> ...

If a someone hired 100,000 people to manually type copies and individually
send 100 substantially identical messages/day, would that be spam?
In other words, I bet your statement is wrong and that what you really
care about is "bulk."  In practice "AUTOMATED" and "bulk" go together
in spam, but it's the "bulk" that matters and how the stuff is produced.

This is related to the fact that "commercial" or "advertising" is not
a good characterization of "spam," although in practice almost all of
the mail that you would label as "spam" is flogging something.

We could try to define "burglary" more precisely than being where you
don't have permission for a malicious purpose, but that would be a
big mistake.  We could define "burglarly tools" as all screw drivers
and crowbars or never as screw drivers or crowbars, but either choice
would be bad.  You can literally be convicted in the U.S. of "possessions
of burglary tools" for having a screw driver in your car and without
being convicted or even charged with burglary (my wife served on a
jury in such a case).  On balance, this fuzziness is a good albeit
imperfect thing.

That "burglary" is fuzzy does not hinder technical defenses against
it including guards and alarms.  Defining spam as "unsolicited bulk
email" without getting legalistic about the words (e.g. is SMS email?
what about x.400 or UUCP mail?) does not stop us from producing
effective if imperfect spam defenses.

Vernon Schryver    vjs@rhyolite.com
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