Re: 5c. Message Status - Re: [Asrg] ASRG work items

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 12:55  PM, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

> The word indiscriminate is of course subjective, just like the term 
> spam.
> However a salesperson that sends messages to 10,000 existing customers 
> can
> hardly be considered indiscriminate, nor is a salesperson who sends
> targetted messages to 100 sales prospects, nor is a message with a CFP 
> for
> an anti-spam conference sent to this list.
but I tend to go further: you can be discriminate here, but still not 
have consent.
This is a rewrite of something I just sent to Brad privately that might 
illuminate what I mean. To preface it, I'll note I think people abuse 
the word spam horribly, to the point where it almost has no meaning any 
more, so any attempt to "stop spam" is going to fail because nobody can 
agree how to define it.
going down the rabbit hole of defining this stuff, I make a hard 
delineation between:
1) spam, which in my mind are those idiots that send stuff fraudulently 
with forged return addresses and all that other stuff.
2) legitimate marketing stuff, where the real issue is a consent issue, 
not a fraud issue.
for (1), the root cause is the easy ability to forge spam and the 
difficulty of stopping people. Since I see this kind of crap as 90% of 
the overall problem (or more), finding ways to lock them out of the 
universe is my top priority.
2) where you have real companies doing stupid things, gets lumped in 
with 1, but is really a different problem, and has nothing to do with 
cheap costs or whatever. It has to do with marketing people who ought 
to be kneecapped for being more worried about how many messages got 
sent and not about how many sales were generated...
In both cases, volume is an accelerator to the process, not a cause.

I think the issues of "solving spam" and "dealing with e-marketing 
consent issues" are skew. One is shutting down fraudulent operations, 
the other is regulating legitimate businesses who's practices might or 
might not be up to snuff. But they tend to get lumped together, and 
that adds complexity to the the problem and confuses the issues, and we 
end up going round and round and accomplishing nothing.
They're separate issues, needing separate solutions. I realize there's 
a segment that thinks all e-marketing is by definition spam, but the 
moderate position understands it's not. And no, I'm not excusing badly 
build e-marketing systems, not at all. but the amount of hassle they 
cause is nothing compared to the spam that's fraudulently stuffed down 
out throats every day. And the solutions are different.
but IMHO, you could fix every freaking e-marketer to have perfect 
systems with perfect consent that updates based on telepathy two days 
before the end-user thinks of unsubscribing -- and the typical user 
wouldn't notice because of all the noise and pain caused by the fraud 
spammers. Worse, the e-marketing stuff keeps getting dumped onto the 
same bonfire by the "burn witches! more witches!" crowd, which 
basically derails the process from allowing anyone to focus on solving 
the first, major problem.
I'd like to suggest that we focus on the first, big problem: the group 
of mass mailers that are overtly avoiding allowing users to define 
consent through various fraudulent means. Until that issue is solved, 
nothing else matters. If folks want to start a sub-group to hash out 
issues of consent and try to work with the legitimate e-mailers to 
build a standard, great, but even if that gets resolved to everyone's 
satisfaction, it won't matter if we all wake up to 45 messages every 
morning with pretty pictures of zebras in them.
I keep thinking this group sidetracks itself by being unable to really 
define the problems it's trying to solve (instead, looking for *a* 
problem and defining *a* solution), and not setting priorities among 
them. In all honesty, if we could cut those 45 messages with zebras to 
20 messages with little bluu pills, this group would still be 
considered massive heroes, but there doesn't seem to be any interest or 
motivation towards fixing a chunk of the problem, and instead we turn 
around and chase our tails.
Don't think for a second I think this group's been useless, by the way. 
There are lots of useful things being done and lots of good mixing and 
sharing and considering. But I'm not seeing it moved to the next step, 
and the group itself seems to be somewhat passive about moving itself. 
And I think that's why the frustration level on the group is building, 
because we're tail chasing now, and nobody's defined which rabbit gets 
chased first...
And the reality is, there are a lot of rabbits and a lot of holes, and 
we need to be careful lest we step in a hole and break our ankle -- but 
right now, I feel like we're sitting in the kennel chasing each other.
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