On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 11:56:50AM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
Is it? Even if only 20% of the message content is common?
Yup. When it comes to definitions and rules, computers don't break rules.
Only humans break rules. Computers simply execute commands.
So what matters in all rule making when it comes to definitions for humans is
action by humans. If a human orders 50,000 mails sent, that's a mass mailing.
I personally feel that attempts to fine tune the defintion get pretty murky
after that. You don't want to have to answer questions like a threshold of
difference among the messages, or what percentage of the text was the same
from message to message.
You want to use only objective facts where you can. This particular objective
fact may be one that requires human analysis in some cases, but the goal of
the analysis is an objective fact, not an opinion. As such it's better. I
recommend all definitions try to stay as close to factual judgements as
possible. That's why in past threads I advocated not attempting to judge
the quality of the relationship the recipient has to the sender, just making
a basic judgement of whether the recipient has had voluntary communication in
the past to the sender. He either has or he hasn't, I think.
And, as it turns out, pure volume is something computers can detect, and it
is the root cause of spam. "Did this user send out mail to 50,000
destinations"
is a factual question which, for example, their ISP could answer, or a
pooled MX server for many large sites could answer without ambiguity. Without
having to look at the contents of the message.
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