Re: legitimate unsolicited commercial e-mail vs spam

From: Matt Magri <matt_at_netmeg.net>
Date: Fri 5 Nov 1999 13:52:43 -0500

JOHN MALYON WROTE:
> I certainly resent the spam I receive in my inbasket as
> much as anyone, but I do think that the common term
> "unsolicited commercial e-mail" is too vague. I would
> certainly be afraid of any law which enshrined this
> phrase.

An actual law would contain a definition which you can pass
judgement on. The CAUCE (<http://www.cauce.org/> site keeps
track of the current bills.

> "Unsolicited" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Who has
> ever "solicited" e-mail, except when you forget to uncheck
> those opt-in boxes which now appear on every web form?

In day-to-day use, the biggest components are that you
actually asked for commercial email from that source -or-
you have a prior business relationship with the sender of a
sort that would make the commercial mailing appropriate.
There are other circumstances that might make it
appropriate, but those are the biggies. As far as a law
goes, however, it would have to be defined in there.

> "commercial" is such a broad term that if I send you an
> e-mail offering to advertise on your web site, that could
> fit the definition of spam.

In practice, this difficulty doesn't seem to exist... it's
the ads people don't like. While I agree that a law should
make a distinction, I'd be more concerned that the
distinction be made in the text of the bill than in the
phrase that's used in place of "spam".

> For that matter, I have also received non-commercial
> spam on a number of occasions. I think the important
> thing that distinguishes spam from conventional e-mail,
> is that it is a mass mailing.

There are some folks who prefer the term "unsolicited bulk
email" (UBE). Part of the reason is that they don't like
getting bulk e-mailed religious messages, chain letters,
etc. either. The term also includes the volume aspect you
like.

> If I am > blind-copied on an email, or if there are more
> than a couple of recipients, in my experience that
> message is almost certainly spam. But if someone writes a
> letter to me personally, I don't object to that even if it
> proves to be of no value to me.

The thing is, there's no formulaic way for one recpient to
tell the difference. I get bulk spam which has my address
(and my address alone) in the To: line. How would I know
that it was bulk if I hadn't checked with a number of other
sites about it? Even if you are Bcc-ed, that doesn't tell
you whether the thing was sent to 5 people or 50,000. Would
5 recipients consist of a "mass e-mail". For that matter,
the spams which have your address in the To: line involve
automated software that makes a single connection to a
mailserver for each delivery, just like any other nonbulk
mail delivery. Is that "mass e-mail"?

The point is that any definition is vague and, as a result,
the devil is in the details. When it comes to laws,
agonizing over the term you use to refer to spam isn't as
important as poring over the text of a bill, itself.

Personally, I'm not happy about having a legislative
solution at all, since "legislative solution" is yet another
oxymoron.

Matt
--
Matt Magri
Netmeg Internet




Received on Fri Nov 05 1999 - 12:52:43 CST