At 8:57 PM -0500 4/24/03, wayne wrote:
I think this "About ESPC" webpage tells you a lot about what "problem"
they really want to solve:
http://www.networkadvertising.org/espc/about_espc.asp
They give two (2) paragraphs on the threat of spam, and seven (7)
paragraphs on the threats of filtering and blacklists.
In fairness to them. That's the problem they are facing, not spam
per se. And their solution will solve their problem--it will make it
easy to whitelist "legitimate" senders.
There is one other reason that I think this is a good idea. It will
let *us* (as in, the end-user population) hold them accountable for
their email. I don't think they have any real idea just how much of
their email is unwanted. I've had arguments with a number of the
companies on their membership list. They regularly send email to
accounts that don't exist. Furthermore, they regularly send
*repeated* email to accounts that don't exist. I even filed an
affidavit for MAPS in one of their legal fights with an ESPC member.
If they sign up for a "no spam" policy, and they make it possible to
easily identify who's screwing up, this make force them (unwillingly)
into the confirmed-opt-in situation they are trying to avoid.
While it won't solve the spam problem--reigning in the legitimate
bulk mailers will help a lot. It will also make tools like DCC more
useful, since if you can recognize email as bulk, and it isn't
tagged, the chance of false positives drops significantly.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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