John Levine wrote:
I suspect that if we are not even able to agree on a definition of
spam, there will never be much efficient anti-spam research by our
group.
The world hasn't agreed on a definition of spam in 20 years, and I see
no reason to think that anything has changed that would make it
possible to do so now.
The European directives on privacy arrived around the turn of the
century, so they are new in that respect. They may have all the
defects that European directives usually have, but provide
definitions. Not for spam, as I mentioned upthread; however, spam can
be treated in that framework.
Fortunately, all of the popular definitions (UBE, UCE, UBCE, mail
recipients don't want) in practice tend to describe roughly the same
mail.
I'd say they just largely overlap. I'd guess one line of disagreement
would be what kind of well behaved direct marketing, if any, should be
considered non-spam. That is, whether the "U" in the above definition
may be considered implicit, on the argument that recipients cannot
solicit something whose existence they ignore.
MRDW (I'd propose to pronounce it "mérde-u", if that's the correct
acronym for the last definition), although practical, is horrible.
I'd also add botnet/zombie generated, spam to that list.
So my suggestion is that documents discussing anti-spam
techniques say which definition they're using, if it matters, and
leave it at that. Readers specifically don't get to complain that
it's the wrong definition.
+1
That way, at least, we know what we're talking about. In addition,
this suggestion leaves room for an eventual informative paper listing
those popular definitions.
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