Guiding General Principles: - spam is UBE (unsolicited bulk email)
I don't think we're going to end up with a single uniform definition of spam.
to some, spam is simply unwanted mail. presumably unwanted implies
unsolicited, but unsolicited does not imply unwanted.
to some, bulk is a necessary condition for spam. I'm guessing that this is
based on a presumption that bulk mail is necessarily untargeted, or perhaps
that we only need to be concerned about bulk unwanted mail since that is
the biggest part of the problem.
to some, commercial is a necessary condition for spam. I'm guessing that this
is based on a desire to not censor non-commercial speech.
to some, spam is entirely a matter of content, not behavior. to others,
it's exactly the opposite. to others, it is some of each.
I could see where we might end up with a mechanism by which mail was tagged
according to each of several attributes: whether it was bulk, whether it was
commercial, whether the sender could be reliably traced, whether the sender
had a good or bad or no reputation, etc. a recipient's filter (or a filter
acting on consent of a recipient) could then treat different kinds of mail
differently based on the tags, or the absence of such tags.
that way, we wouldn't all have to agree on what spam was.
Keith
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