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RE: [Asrg] A Taxonomy of Spam

2006-07-25 18:13:38

From: John Levine [mailto:asrg(_at_)johnlevine(_dot_)com] 


OK so defining the term spam is off limits to the group 
because it ends 
up in definitional flame wars. A lot of folk were engaging in flame 
wars and there were folk whose definition of spam was 'that which is 
identified as spam by my scheme'.

Taxonmies of spam are fine, and I agree they can be useful.  
You just have to stop when people start saying "no, you can't 
add that category because it's not really spam yada yada".

I think that the part that created real flames was where people were discussing 
challenge-response schemes. The proponents of the schemes got very touchy when 
people like me pointed out that they consider the challenges to be spam. So 
their schemes became spam transfer schemes, not spam elimination schemes.

Regardless it has been a very long time since I saw one of those schemes in 
use. I suspect because my anti-spam filter like most others these days filters 
out the challenges as spam.

If it is an identifiable category of unwanted comunication people should be 
able to filter it out. Thinking about it further I think that there may even be 
a reason to remove my 'indiscriminate' exception which is pretty much an 
artifact of it being email and email being seen as a substitute for mail.


These are social problems and the study of why trolls infect mailing lists is 
just as much a legitimate subject of serious research as how to stop the 
advance fee fraud rings.

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