At 07:33 PM 6/3/2003 -0400, you wrote:
I've been thinking about the various definitions of "spam" and thought
of another criteria which isn't necessarily mutually exclusive but
captures something important:
Spam is e-mail from a source which is hard to impossible for
the recipient to stop and/or reasonably prevent from receiving.
I think it would be important to note that it is AUTOMATED.
For example, if I get a letter from someone who thinks that because of my
business, that they have a tool that I might be interested in and if they
have typed the e-mail themselves and sent it to me then as far as I'm
concerned it is OK. It is OK even if I'm not interested in their
product. The fact of the matter is that they actually took the time (e.g.,
economic cost) to sort out who they were going to send their letter to and
that they sent it to me based on their judgement that it was actually
relevant to me.
However, much (most) spam is not targeted specifically and we get so much
of it that it is overwhelming. Personally, I don't think that it is spam
in itself that is so much the problem as is the fact that it is not
targeted and we are all overwhelmed with it. (I get several hundred per-day
that I have to sort through.)
For example, if those of us who are programmers were provided with a single
e-mail that advertised a C/C++ compiler that compiled what you meant rather
than what you typed (and it actually worked) for those of us who are
programmer's it would probably be greatly appreciated. Why would it be
appreciated? Because it would have great bearing on our business and it
would save lots of time and money. But if we received 1,000 of these it
wouldn't be appreciated nor would advertisements for underwear (even though
most people wear underwear -- making it relevant but not very relevant).
The key to all this is the economic cost either in time or money or ...
that the sender went through to send it. When there is no economic cost
then we end up with a runaway situation such as it is today.
So, as mentioned before, I think the AUTOMATED word needs to be there
though I can easily envision where mail sent in an automated fashion.
Also, one problem with your definition is that given a hypothetical
situation where everybody actually unsubscribed you if you unsubscribed,
there are too many potential mailing lists (one for each company world
wide) that one would have to unsubscribe to in order to even fractionally
reduce the amount of spam received. (This is of course, ignoring the fact
that there are a few spammers that send most of the spam.)
I don't mind people sending me something that is actually relevant to my
wants and needs and I know it has been carefully considered and that
someone on the other end actually took the time to compose a letter and
send it to me. I do mind getting inundated with tons (if bits can be
measured that way) of irrelevant crap.
-Art
--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.
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