Re: legitimate unsolicited commercial e-mail vs spam

From: Jim Reardon <jim_at_amusive.com>
Date: Fri 29 Oct 1999 12:07:40 -0400 (EDT)

DAVID ROSS WROTE:
> I am writing a paper taking the position that legitimate
> unsolicited commercial e-mail (e.g. business to business, or
> directed at website owners, complying with proposed/actual
> federal and/or state legislation, with easy removal from
> mailing list, etc) should be distinguished from "bad" spam
> (e.g. fake return addresses, pyramid plans, pornography,
> etc.), and should be permitted (if not actually encouraged).

There is absolutely no good unsolicited commercial email.
It's not possible to target UCE... Provable by the 'smart'
spambots that send me messages such as:

"Hello Carl" [my name is Jim, don't ask me where Carl is
from] "I just visited your sports related site" [No sports
whatsoever even close to being mentioned on my site] "at
http://www.freecenter.com/ibe/general.pl?ID=banister&page=XX
" [I run a button exchange. They grabbed a URL of the
clickthrough link] " and I must say I'm impressed."

He then goes on to tell me I should buy his garbage. I
report him, his account gets deleted, waste of my time and
his.

I should also mention I always get one for each and every
one of my sites -- one for FreeCenter.com, one for
HumorPlanet.com, and one for SiteGadgets.com. So I'm not
just annoyed, I'm annoyed three times. And there is NO way
to filter out these three addresses as actually being the
same (they end in a different domain).

Add that to the fact that there are... well... how many
millions of websites? If even 1% of them sent you a
solicited mail once a month, your E-mail would be useless.
I've actually had to stop using an old email account because
I honestly get almost 100 UCEs a day at it (and all from
normal use). You can claim you can target it, you can claim
it's only being sent to people who read it, but that would
be lying. If spam was ENCOURAGED, I know a lot more email
accounts would be exactly reduced to exactly the same
uselessness.

---
 Jim Reardon <jim_at_amusive.com> 815-260-3977
 free guestbooks, message boards, more -
 http://www.sitegadgets.com/?sig
 free web resouces - http://www.freecenter.com/
 why everyone's always laughing at you -
 http://www.humorplanet.com/





Received on Fri Oct 29 1999 - 11:07:40 CDT