[Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

> This is a relatively young forum for discussions about spam. One 
lesson from other places is that there is no point in defining what 
is or is not spam because even if there were to be an agreement of 
some sort to settle on some useful definition, there will be some 
people who want to shun other sorts of mail or some people who think 
some subset of spam should not be shunned or both.  If one defines 
'spam' in some way that is technically discernable with any sort of 
useful reliability, so much unsolicited bulk email will be excluded 
that practically no one will take that definition seriously. In the 
end, debates over what is or is not spam always devolve into 
scholastic hair-splitting over things like the nature of permission 
and the meaning of 'bulk' or 'broadcast' and so on.

Of course, as far as the recipient, THEIR decision about what is spam and what 
isn't, and what they want to receive and what they don't, is the ONLY opinion 
which matters in the final analysis.

This is yet another reason why a fine-grained permissions-based approach, where 
the *recipient* can decide what E-mails they do and do not want to receive 
(based on who the sender is, and what the mail contains) is so decidedly the 
right way to pursue this problem.  Especially with threats of attorneys et al, 
there is NO feasible way for a spammer to try to sue a recipient who has chosen 
to refuse to accept, or read, the mail a spammer has tried to jam into the 
recipient's mailbox.  [This does NOT apply to mail that has been 'filtered' by 
some upstream authority, an ISP perhaps, based on their OWN arbitrary rules.]


Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support free and fair US elections!  http://stickers.defend-democracy.org
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.



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