On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 12:54:10PM -0600, wayne wrote:
Ok, this might make an interesting test case.
Is tim(_at_)mailkey(_dot_)com spamming people?
Sort of -- but what he's really doing is violating the rule, fairly well
established though not RFCd properly, that an autoresponder MUST NOT respond
to mail which has a "Precedence: bulk" header.
This is not the first time this has come up. Every so often somebody writes
a broken Vacation program or other autoresponder which responds to mailing
list mail, and everybody who posts to the list gets a response from it,
and they all get annoyed, and the person is taken off the list until they
get better software. (Or sometimes the list manager realizes they should
be putting the Precdence: bulk header on the list mail.)
Are we, by all subscribing to this list, consenting to email from
others who are on this list?
Independent question. Unless otherwise specified, then yes, by POSTING to
the list, you are indeed soliciting replies to your postings. Subscribing
to the list only solicits mails from the list, of course.
The idea that if you send me E-mail (by whatever means, be it directly or
a list) that I can't reply to you seems ludicrous to me. If anti-spam thought
has led people to that conclusion, it's another sign of the emotional damage
spam has caused.
Can I auto-reply to you? If I'm the list manager, certainly. If I am a list
member, probably not, but it's a purely technical question, not so much a spam
one. This question is far older than the spam problem.
(Though I will note that the term spam came into its current meaning not
to refer to commercial postings but in fact to runaway robot softare which
flooded first MUDs, and later USENET. In fact, Monday is the 10th
anniversary of the first use of the term "spam" on USENET to refer to a
mass posting. In this case, it was Dick Depew's AARM program which went amok
and flooded news.admin!)
Also coming up (I am going to do a small article) in May is the 25th anniversary
of the first E-mail spam, sent by a DEC salesman to everybody on the Arpanet
on the west coast.)
All of the emails from tim(_at_)mailkey(_dot_)com are slightly different, so
do
they count as bulk?
Are these messages commercial?
To me that's not relevant, though I know some consider it relevant to spam.
Do we even know this guy works at mailkey, or could he just be somebody
with a mailbox there.
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