On 27/Sep/11 15:26, John Leslie wrote:
Alessandro Vesely <vesely(_at_)tana(_dot_)it> wrote:
Consider this (is it spam?)
Dear Xyz,
you receive this because you subscribed to the
Acme Customers Group. Now, we just happened to invent B!
Certainly, for probably the majority of recipients it _is_
unsolicited commercial email. But, of course, if they think kindly
of A -- and this is the only email notification concerning B, they
will probably forgive A.
Thus, it is UCE but, if you define "spam" what is reported as such, it
is not.
IOW, opt-out implies the existence of some "fuzzy opt-in" set, which
can be built in widely different ways, e.g. interest lists/groups,
public directories, harvested addresses, million-address CDs, swiped
personal address books, et cetera.
Exactly!
Clearly, some interest groups are focused enough for some
"near-topic" announcements to be appropriate; while most lists of
harvested addresses are not.
More than "near-topic", it is usually tagged "same-vendor". A happy
Acme customer can put up with some unsolicited announces, as long as
they don't come too often.
But it's hard to convince amateur spammers that their pet project
isn't actually of interest to more than 50% of the general population.
(I tried once and failed, and had to fire that customer.)
It may be that most readers of this list prefer the extreme
definition that started this email. If so, I think any thread under
an "opt-out" title needs to die. If not, we might try discussing
"opt-out" to mean "each user can register, with some assurance of
privacy, the desire to not receive certain kinds of unsolicited email".
(Or perhaps it would be better to invent another name for that...)
Obviously, people can only solicit something if they know it exists.
How about the complementary approach, "each user can register, with an
even weaker assurance of privacy, the desire to receive certain kinds
of unsolicited email"? By complementarity, those who don't register
at all, can be assumed to be not interested in any of the available
topics.
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