On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 09:15:03PM -0500, Alan DeKok wrote:
Is commercial (Many people request this in the definition,
but usually only if not including the mass mailing
component, so this might not stay)
Only crazy people spend money to send out thousands of messagesm and
don't expect a monetary return. They're usually fairly easy to track
down, because of this. They're also a tiny part of the spam problem.
Witness the crazies on Usenet, years before Cantor & Siegel. The
problems they caused were annoying, but they didn't cause the furor
resulting from the first "spam" message.
Actually, that's not true. I regularly receive spam whose motive is
charity (please help my dying kid) or political and even sometimes religious.
In addition, a significant number of spams I recieve are not commercial at
all, but illegal for other reasons. They tell me somebody wants to transfer
32 MILLION DOLLARS from Nigeria into my bank account. It's not an ad of
any type, just a confidence trick.
Thus I am not sure if commercial can fit in the definition or not. I just
know a number of people put it in. I think the primary reason they do so
is they look at the problem from a legal perspective, and incorrectly believe
that they will have a better chance of passing a law regulating commercial
spam than one regulating all of it. (See Cincinatti vs. Discovery Network for
why the supreme court ruled this may be a mistaken impression.)
Myself, I am loathe to regulate of filter mail based on what it says rather
than how it is sent, but again, I include this because others have pushed
for it. If they all want to disclaim it, it need not be listed.
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