From: Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui(_at_)plaidworks(_dot_)com>
I do so love it when people pull these games in the middle of a private
conversation.
There was no private conversation, but only a private flamewar somewhat
related to our public exchanges and about "silly questions," "silliness,"
and wastes of time. It consisted of three messages from Mr. Von
Rospach including the rejected message and one from me. If he had
not tried to revive the private flamewar despite my silence, he would
never have known I had deployed a mechanical aid to help me deal
appropriately (i.e. silently) with our problem.
This little drama is related to the spam problem. There is a component
of human nature that hates purposefully not being heard. Senders of
bulk advertising are often irrationally upset about being filtered.
See the several daily threads in news.admin.net-abuse.email with
"SPEWS" in subject lines. Consider the anger of the gentleman from
Verisign at SPEWS despite the probably insignificant effect on Verisign's
communications of any SPEWS listing. Look at the spam that tries so
hard to get around a little spam filtering that it cannot be decoded
by any MUA, but only by a human who knows enough about HTML and spam
to guess what the spammer was trying to do.
Any even moderately effective spam solution evokes irrational efforts
by advertisers to get around it. On the other hand, per-sender opt-out
or any other communicating of consent to senders works with only some
senders, and generally only with senders that try hard not to send to
you in the first place.
This is not technical in the sense of network protocols or the logarithm
problem in finite fields, but it is technical in the sense that fixing
spam must be. Human nature is relevant technical information.
Now I'm convinced this group has shown why groups like this won't solve
the problem.
I'm not sure, but if you really believe that, I suspect it contains
a germ of a plan to let you "go do something useful now."
And I think he proves my belief the insult was intentional.
If I knew which of my words in which of my messags he took as insults,
I would either appologize or affirm them as the plain truth.
But "let's not and say we did."
Could we please do something productive like agree on definitions term?
I like the notion of defining more than one term to replace "spam,"
so that we might break out of the cycles of "Look at my perfect spam
solution"--"No, it's useless because it doesn't fix all of what I
define as spam." With different words for the differing notions of
"spam," those cycles might cease.
The word "spam" cannot be defined, but its varients can be. I think
all three of (1) unsolicited, (2) bulk, and (3) unsolicited bulk email
can be defined.
How about words or phrases that suggest notions of "spam" other than UBE?
Perhaps unsolicited commercial email? "E-marketing email"?
Even "opt-out" needs refining. I think Mr. Von Rospach has meant
"per-sender opt-out" when he recently wrote "opt-out," but perhaps
he meant "global, per recipeint once per year (or forever?) opt-out"
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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