At 9:05 -0800 3/29/03, Dave Crocker wrote:
Jim,
I hear that you are the world's expert on ice cream. I want to hire you
to help my ice cream manufacturing business. We have never met. I send
you an email.
The above definition classifies my email as spam.
JY> Not that it's a solution, but it seems such a person could give
blanket consent
JY> for potential collaborators or customers to contact him for professional
JY> reasons related to ice cream, and if JK happens to be an
eccentric ice cream
JY> inventor who talks to nobody, then he would presumably not give
such consent
JY> because he truly does not care to be contacted/hired.
1. Multi-level marketing schemes solicit your participation in an
activity that can easily be classed at "potential collaboration". Yet
most people would class those solicitations as spam.
2. Given that this is a technical research body, how does one go about
offering that consent, in a service with 100 million participants, and
how does one enforce it?
I said it wasn't a solution, was just pointing out that if you are going to get
into the morass of consent, well, there are ways to declare consent, and some
workable-or-not technological solutions have already been stated
here. Legally, it's
possible to define consent generally. If you ring my doorbell a lot,
for example,
the police can be engaged to make you stop. On the other hand, if
you're bringing me
some money every time, I won't mind it.
As for offering consent, well, we've made it pretty far in
civilization with a personal
concept of consent/access in every medium but e-mail, so there are
means. As far as
enforcement goes, the social contract in most places is that
government enacts laws
that enable civil action, so, "no means no" can be enforced, were it
to come to that.
Personally, I think that a definition of wanted or unwanted
communications is mostly
a personal thing. Given that, I feel the most fruitful activity for
machinery between
message-sender and message-recipient is to help define the character
of the message,
using info known at those places that's not necessarily known at the
recipient end...
then disposition can be controlled at or near final delivery. Maybe I
would adopt a
profile made available by like-minded people, but that's still a
personal decision.
And that has nothing to do with consent, except that if I personally
have sense of what
I care to allow, I may encode that policy near me, in a way that
doesn't necessarily
affect anyone else except when I generate a bounce or a fresh
complaint, and thus a
new message that's subject to someone else's sense of "consent."
- Jim
(regretting this reply, because I'll get another annoying message, or several,
from tim(_at_)mailkey(_dot_)com, who has never seen any of this, and I did not
_consent_ to be
hounded by his mailserver until I click the link it wants me to click).
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