On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 01:49:32PM -0700, Vernon Schryver wrote:
I have a party-invite mailing list. ...
That does not sound like unsolicited bulk email. It was solicited by
the recipeints when they gave you their addresses. Moreover, I doubt
But they didn't. For example I might meet you at a conference and
find you interesting. Later I might type your name into google, find
your e-mail address and add it to my list to invite you to my party.
Now the reason people put their emails on web pages is so strangers
can mail them, but, generally the rule of anti-spam has been this is
not a solicitation to go on a mailing list, but rather an invitation
for individuals to send mail on relevant topics. Ie. if I publish
a paper on spam and include my E-mail, I expect people to mail me their
comments on it. I don't expect it to be put on mailing lists.
But if I know the person, then it's OK. If for no other reason than
mathematics -- you only know so many people, so the number of
private lists you might get on is manageable even if you get the
occasional annoying mail.
We are not, after all, out to stop every email we might find
annoying, but to stop the flood of email that makes our mailboxes
less useful and our servers loaded. We don't (I don't) come into
this with any belief in a right not to be annoyed by the occasional
unsolicited commication, rather I view that as a price of a society
with free communication.
you send any invitations to people who you even suspect might object,
which is to say, you only send solicited invitiations. That you don't
That's too subjective for a definition. In free speech jurisprudence,
we demand precise definitions to avoid the "chilling effect" problem.
If the definition is subjective, then surely some people will avoid
sending what would have been legitimate communication "just to be
on the safe side."
Thus the history of a century of rulings for free speech from the
supreme court -- trust them on this.
get a contract signed in blood when you collect mail addresses does
not make your mail unsolicited.
"From a stranger" is related to "solicited," and has worse problem.
On one hand, it's easy to think of cases, albeit unusual, where bulk
mail from strangers is solicited. On the other "initiated contact"
and "stranger" are just as fuzzy as "solicit." You can't make
the notion completely precise. Slathering additional fuzzy notions
on the basic idea of "mail I don't won't" does not help.
Well, I will add that if you solicit mail from strangers, then of
course that is not spam if they send it. In this case if your
solicitation is vague, it's your problem.
However, I am defining stranger as "somebody you voluntarily initiated
contact with." I think that's not subjective. You either did or
didn't. Yes, it might sometimes take a bit of work to determine
(mostly on the voluntary question) but you, yourself would never
be in doubt.
The definition becomes vital because of course the system of
punishment -- private or legal -- is based on it. People must
not only not have legit mail never blocked, they must never be
even afraid to send it. That's the chilling effect doctrine.
If I meet you at a conference, and you say anything but "go away",
then we are not strangers, and I know that for sure. Yes, we
might end up remembering things differently but we have ways in
our systems to deal with that sort of question. What we have a
hard time dealing with is one person saying, "You bought version 1,
surely you were asking to be told when version 2 was out" and
the other saying, "No, I didn't."
Exactly what transactions make you other than a stranger? How about
visiting a web site with an old browser that leaks mail addresses?
What about walking around a trade show with a name tag that has your
mail address?
I doubt there are any browsers out there like that. Anyway, if there
were, why not? Again, mathematically there are only a few thousands
of companies and people who are not strangers to you, while there are
billions who are. That's so many orders of magnitude. If a
simple definition cuts the numbers who might spam by this much, it's
more than sufficient. Especially combined with an unsubscribe rule.
Such a rule would imply that if you knew 3,000 companies, you would
at most get 3,000 unwanted mails, and probably far, far less. That's
2 weeks of spam for me!
When "stranger" works as you want it to, it yields the same results
as "UBE." When "UBE" honestly does not work, neither will "stranger"
I'll need to be convinced more of this. You can define "solicited"
very strictly of course, but we don't want it that strict. So we
have all sorts of implicit solicitations, which are fraught with
peril. You note that a personal conversation is one of them.
Can you opt-out when originally becoming a non-stranger, such as
by buying? I hope so.
That would be good practice, but even if you have to tolerate one
e-mail for every product you buy, I think that's well within
acceptable limits. Not perfect, but we don't want to be perfect.
(Another well established principle of free speech jurisprudene. If
you're getting all of it, you're going too far.)
The trouble with that is in practice it would be the same as either
opt-out or UBE. Non-spammers will have records showing you contacted
them and asked for their bulk mail. Spammers will have inventions
"proving" you and they are not "strangers." For example, one spammer
claimed to have obtained my address from my having signed up or left
my business card at a trade show. The spam was for decals that look
like bullet holes. That was a lie, but it demonstrates the problem.
They will always lie. Our systems of justice have thousands of years
of practice at dealing with that problem. Not always perfectly but
the best we've been able to do.
This spammer would get to lie about you. But the 10th person that
says they lied then the body that is deciding what to do with the
spammer will change their judgement. It's just not a practical lie.
One thing we could do with opt-out, if this is to be a problem, is
that you could standardize the unsubscribe protocol, and your mailer
could cc all unsubscribes to a service that logs them and timestamps
them.
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