An exact definition spam is a political topic, not a technical one,
The reformulation of the problem as one of consent helped clarify
views on this "social" (rather than "political" ?) ill.
and is not within the purview of ASRG.
Well, bless you too.
If you look at all the halfway
plausible definitions of spam, such as UBE, UCE, or mail that users
complain to their ISPs about, they all describe about 95% the same
mail, so for most purposes any definition will do.
Any definition? Right.
For any proposed anti-spam topic or technique, it would be a good idea
to describe what it deals with. For the various LMAP proposals, for
example, it appears to me to be "mail sent from hosts other than ones
authorized by the owner of the domain in the envelope return address."
This might seem like a "good thing" - but of course this means that there
is no way of comparing proposals meaningfully. e.g. Scheme (a) will
probably be (very close to) 100% effective at stopping the set of email
messages that the creator states it is targeted at. Unless the creator is a
complete idiot. Scheme (b) is likewise 100% effective for the (overlapping
but not identical) set it is designed for. How does this help anyone?
The question of a precise definition of spam has been beaten to death
at such length in so many places that I'm surprised to see it coming
up again.
I'm guessing you're missing the point on purpose. Or maybe you haven't been
following this list. But just to clarify - the consensus seems to be that
spam (as we call it) is "supported" in the MTS because of issues of access,
authentication, authorisation, anonymity, accountability and lack of
recipient "power". These *are* technically approachable issues (as well as
being often economic and contractual). These can be well-defined.
"spam" is not an entity in this technical domain (except as a "class" of
messages) which is why the group shouldn't depend on it.
*You* have rechartered the group to work on the poorly defined "spam"
problem. Previously, the group worked on issues raised by communication
characterised by (lack of) consent.
Furthermore, the group is now chartered to focus on "approaches that can be
defined, deployed and used in the near term". Research Groups are usually
focussed and long term, though short lived "task force" like Research
Groups are possible (I'm quoting). Is the group to be one of the latter?
I suspect that this rechartering is a "political" issue, perhaps there's
pressure to produce "appropriate" results in a predetermined timescale.
Regards,
JK
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