We realized that the definition is inconsistent and people in this community
have spent many years debating "unsolicited bulk" versus "unsolicited
commercial bulk" versus a host of other definitions seeking some form of
optimal cover set of everyone's personal definition.
To a recipient, spam is mail he finds annoying, doesn't want to receive, and
thinks the sender should have known better than to send to him.
(It's like the famous judge's definition of porn: "I know it when I see it.")
To an ISP, spam is what violates its AUP. Alternately, it's what customers
complain about loudly enough that the ISP has to spend resources doing
something about it, thus increasing cost and decreasing margin.
To a sender, spam is whatever someone else is doing. No spammer sees himself
as part of the problem :)
IMHO, it's important to keep these fundamentally different perspectives in
mind. A recipient who receives an annoying message is just as annoyed whether
he is the sole recipient of that message or whether it was sent to millions of
people. ISPs don't want to deal with every annoying message that someone
receives, and we don't want to penalize every sender who happens to
occasionally annoy someone over email. It makes sense for ISPs to be concerned
about the *volume* of annoying messages that are sent out (hence "bulk") or
whether the messages sent out violate some well-defined criteria (e.g.
"commercial") that can be cited as violations of the sender's contract with
the ISP. But these criteria should not be viewed as sacrosanct, and
different, or additional, criteria may also be valid.
Keith
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