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

> From: Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net>

> ...
> Imagine a student who is researching a paper and hears about a number of
> different people who might have relevant knowledge.

> ...
> The student sends the same query for assistance to each of these people.
> It does not matter whether the student sends a different copy (with the
> same text) to each recipient or puts all of the recipients into the
> address list of the same.
>
> And there are many reasonable examples of scenarios, like this, which
> qualify as spam, according to your definition, but would not qualify as
> spam to the general community of email users.

The error in that is common.  You are construing "unsolicited bulk email"
as if it were an aritimetic formula, effectively computable algorithm (the
formal notion related to "Turing computable"), or a statement in a first
order predicate calculus instead of a law or rule among people.

Consider the legal notion of "burglary."  It is not a first order
logical predicate but what a "reasonable person" sees as being in the
wrong place without permission and with bad intentions.  The fuzziness
of "wrong place," "permission," and "malice" is intentional and vital
and not a bug.

Look at "cracking" or "security attack."   There is no confusion there
(at least among us) despite the fact that the same set of packets can
be benign or an attack depending on circumstances.  We each act as
the legal word's notion of a "reasonable person" in that area.

If the student's query were "solicited" by its targets, then it would
not be "unsolicted bulk email."  If it were not solicited and it
involved what a reasonable person would consider lots of mail, then
it would be "unsolicited bulk email."   That "unsolicited" and "bulk"
are not defined legalistically and as a number is a feature instead
of a bug for the same reason that you don't say that every strange
UDP packet a "port scan."

It's odd how many people who are "reasonable" in the legal sense of
a "reasonable person" when confronted with a tcpdump trace or some
real mail but when talking about spam definitions turn into either
GFWs or Richard Stallmans of the 1980s demanding the inalienable right
to use any and all unused CPU cycles and disk space on other people's
computers.

(GFWs or "Goobers with firewalls" are experts with "personal firewalls"
who report "hacking" from the root's DNS servers.)

Vernon Schryver    vjs@rhyolite.com
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