From: "Jon Kyme" <jrk(_at_)merseymail(_dot_)com>
An irony is that most who believe in implicit consent do not believe
it applies to all mail. They find various categories, such as child
pornography, impossible to consent to implicitly, and so for that
mail, they act as if they don't believe in implicit consent.
Why is this "an irony"? It seems me to be an eminently reasonable position.
Please explain.
Yesterday it seemed ironic. I'm not sure today. Today I'm sure of
soemthing else.
We all believe in implicit consent for receiving some mail in our
public mailboxes, including
- mail we have explicitly requested.
- non-bulk mail from people to whom we have knowingly giving our
addresses
- inoffensive low volume, non-commercial, private, non-bulk mail
from strangers.
There is no consensus beyond that for:
- low volume, non-commercial, private, non-bulk flames from strangers.
(e.g. some contributors to this mailing list and readers of netnews
believe their private flames are welcome.)
- bulk requests from strangers to send additional mail
("you will never hear more about our great offers unless you respond")
- non-commercial, bulk mail from strangers
- commercial, bulk mail from strangers
The single most useful thing that might be done here this year is to
establish the default implicit consent for a mailbox connected to the
Internet. Such a determination would help legislators and courts
as well as system administrators on both sides of the spam fence.
Something offical from the IETF (yes, this is the IRTF) saying something
like the following would be very valuable:
- consent to receive mail is always determined by the mailbox owner
and never by mail senders.
- unless explicitly revoked or extended (e.g. by explicitly
"subscribing"), a mailbox connected to the Internet implies a
default, implicit, or implied consent or solicitation to receive
any non-bulk mail that does not violate any applicable law.
- bulk mail is any set of 50 or more messages that are substantially
identical as determined by a reasonable person.
- Evidence that a mailbox owner has subscribed or solicited mail not
implicitly solicited must be creditable. Email requests that could
reasonably have been sent by third parties are not creditable.
- implicit or explicit consent to receive mail can be revoked by any
means that can reasonably be expected to be preceived by the people
responsible for sending mail, including telephone calls, postal service
mail, email, and SMTP status ("rejection") messages.
The statement must fit the Internet as it exists today. It cannot
involve mechanisms that are not currently widely used, not to mention
mechanisms not yet invented. It must all be clear to all parties and
easily understood and monitored by people with limited technical
knowledge, and so it cannot use interesting ideas like SMTP banners.
This determination cannot be based on the familiar IETF style of
consensus, because interests including some represented by frequent
contributors to this mailing list will never agree to banning
per-sender-opt-out spam, despite the painful implications of the fact
that there are more than 20,000,000 corporations in the U.S. alone.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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