Notes from Memphis meeting

[Jacob Palme <[e-mail]>]

I am not a member of this mailing list, so if you reply, cc your reply to
my personal e-mail address.

Below is my personal notes from the discussion in the RUN group in Memphis.

In this document, the word spam is used as a term for certain kinds of
undesirable messages on the Internet. This use of the word spam has nothing
to do with the trademark for company YYY for its products XXX.

There is a general draft on responsible use of the Internet, but there is a
need for one or more new documents on responsible advertising on the net.
The chairman thought that the word "spam" could not be used because it is a
trademark of a meat product. Other people said that this is no problem,
since e-mail advertising is a different area than meat products. But other
people said that negative connotations of a trade-mark is forbidden also in
other areas. An alternative word "spew" was not liked by the group.

 There is an Internet draft "draft-ietf-run-spew-00.txt" which we discussed.
I suggested that the document must contain a definition of what is accepted
and not accepted. For example, is it permitted to send advertising to
people who have voluntarily subscribed to mailing lists for sending out
commercial information (yes). Is it permitted to require people to provide
their e-mail addresses in order to buy products or get free samples
(maybe)? To what extent can an e-mail address given by a person for use to
send news about a certain product be used to send information about other
products?

There was some discussion on which actions against spamming are acceptable.
Should one CC the local postmaster or not? This may be causing more
problems, not helping anyone. Some organisations have special
"abuse@domains" to which you can send complaints about abuse.

There was discussion that the federal government in the U.S. could
prosecute spammers for misusing their computing resources. Companies with
many e-mail users could also do the same.

Mailing list allow "unsub". You should not sell mailing lists. Clarify how
a list is to be used before soliciting members to the list. All advertising
messages must clearly indicate who is responsible for them. Do not munge
e-mail headers.

Telling people how to unsubscribe from the list is not enough to make
spamming acceptable, especially since spammers often use one-time mailing
lists, so that your unsubscribe messages do not gain you anything.

Advice people about alternative, legal means of advertising on the net and
in other places.

Blinking banner advertisments could be avoided by plug-ins to your web
browser which stops such banners (disable blinking in Netscape, disable
moving

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Jacob Palme <[e-mail]> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme