Spam is commercial speech delivered via email.
That all too popular but unthinking definition outlaws a lot of mail
that people want to receive.
Then there is the practical impossibility of using computers to do
anything to control commercial speech.
Besides that, no thinking ISP or system operator wants to get involved
in deciding whether a given bulk spew of messages is commercial,
religious, political, or some other catagory that is or is not allowed
to be bulk.
Like Danny I don't think "bulk" adds into the equation at all. About the
only place it might enter is in the ISP that provides the bandwidth to
the spammers.
Objectionable mail that is not "bulk" does not cause problems that
the IETF/IRTF needs or ought to consider. Threats, child pornography,
chitchat about terrorism, drugs, unsanctioned political ideas, or any
other sort of objectionable mail can be handled by the same mechanisms
that deal with the same messages on paper. There is nothing the
IRTF/IETF can or should do about them, with the possible exception of
efforts like Fred Baker's Internet-Draft about wiretapping at routers.
Those recent contributions disagreeing with defining spam as unsolicited
bulk email do point out that any definition of "spam" is likely to be
hopelessly controversial among the general public, and suggest that this
group should concentrate on "consent" and "unsolicited bulk email" without
worrying about "spam."
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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