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Re: [Asrg] define spam

2003-03-31 20:35:17
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 10:15:16PM -0500, Eric D. Williams wrote:
What came to me is this.  For at least what appears to be a metric in your 
term 
(over 100's messages) for injection into the MTS, where is this measured?  Is 
the system for measurement sensitive to temporal thresholds, e.g. I send one 
message 'spam' per hour for 100 days?

This is a question of defining spam, as in "What is spam, that thou art not
allowed to do it, or that laws or contracts may punish you for it?"

That's quite different from the question of detecting spam, which is based
on technical metrics.

Or of single or many senders exploiting a temporal window to do their dirt. 
 Thus the traffic experienced is not a problem.  Does 'spam' not remain a 
problem irrespective of the network bandwidth consumed by it's presence?

As noted, the 4 problems caused by spam are server overload, ruination of
mailbox S/N, creation of fear of putting your email address out, and dealing
with both real and bogus complaints.

If you solve these 4 problems that is all that matters.  You refer to problem
1, network bandwidth, which is just one.

However yes, I very definitely say, if you can solve the problem, it does
not matter that some "unwanted" mail goes through.   It's not, I believe
the goal to stop unwanted mail, just to stop getting so much of it that it
makes your mailbox less useful/servers overloaded/etc.

You can't possibly stop all unwanted mail nor would you want to, for if you
managed to do it, then it is inherent in the imperfection of human systems
that you are also stopping some wanted mail to get to that point.

I don't think it necessarily has to be people doing it, as you said it may be 
a 
locus of control that manages the sending from multiple sources.

Right, for definitions, we care about the actions of human beings.  Computers,
and to some extent, employees and affiliates, are just tools that implement
the will of the culpable human in a spam.

So while one employee mailing 10 strangers a sales pitch may not be large
enough to meet a volume threshold we might set for spam, it is a spam if the
employee's boss told him, and many other employees, to do this.


I concur, however this could also lead to (in a legal construct) a loophole.

Indeed, I point it out as one to close in creating a spam definition.
Whether it is a problem depends on the threshold.  For example, if the threshold
is low, like say 25, then even 1000 affiliates could only send 25,000 mails.
Sounds like a lot, but do the math -- there are 50,000,000 mailboxes out there
on spammer's lists.    If we cut the spammers of the world down to 10 million
spams a day that get through, in aggregate, we're talking about getting only
one every 5 days on average, which certainly takes back your mailbox.

Still, I think the loophole can be closed, by saying that it's the count
in a "campaign."   So an affiliate program is a campaign, and all mail by
affiliates due to it would be counted in the total for the maker of the
program.

I don't know.  I think there is also the issue of 'spam' that appears to come 
from someone you know, e.g. a mailing list or a familiar name in the 
recipients 
domain e.g. postmaster(_at_)yourdomain(_dot_)com(_dot_)  Of course we may 
have countermeasures 
to prevent message origination from off site with an 'internal' domain but I 
just don't see that as a universal case.

That is not spam from somebody you know, that is spam forged to appear as
spam from somebody you know.


To my mind most people only know perhaps a few thousand people and a few
thousand corporations.  Of those, only a small number are likley spammers.
The number of opt-outs you would need to do in your life might be numbered
in the few score at most.

And the rest are blacklists? filters? blocks?

Whatever systems people decide to use, of course.
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