vern - one could just as easily argue that the 2K blather you just dumped
into my mailbox is both unsolicited and bulk.
talk about the proverbial mountain the mole hill.
my advice: get some perspective or get better pharmaceuticals...
/mtr
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vernon Schryver" <vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolite(_dot_)com>
To: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 13:16
Subject: Re: networksorcery.com spam
From: "Marshall T. Rose" <mrose(_at_)dbc(_dot_)mtview(_dot_)ca(_dot_)us>
...
vern - as much as i appreciate the modern dictum that "everyone is a
villain", i don't think it would kill you every now and then to look for
a
benign explanation to things.
Spam is not about villainy, fraud, or public services. It is only
about consent to receive bulk mail and scaling for individual mailboxes.
If you don't make the content of spam irrelevant, then you slide down
a slope that prevents you from complaining about any spam or enforcing
anti-spam terms of service. if you excuse benign unsolicited bulk
mail because it serves a public good, such as about rolling blackouts
or IIS worms, then when can you ever complain about spam? For every
unsolicited bulk message, there is at least one person and usually
many who honestly believe that it is in the public interest or the
interest of its targets, even if it porn, a chain letter, or one of
those fraudulent but not illegal (as far as I know) $25 vanity Who's
Who listings. If you allow one person to use unsolicited bulk mail
to maintain a registry of people who live in your neighborhood, or
write RFC's, then how can you criticize or terminate the accounts of
others who are send unsolicited bulk mail for other purposes?
The evil in spam is not advertising or crass commercialism, but scaling.
If 1% of the ~20,000,000 U.S. companies sent monthly reminders of their
existence to 1% of the mailboxes on the net, how many messages would you
receive daily? What if those reminders came from all over the world? If
every reasonable Who's Who that might want to list you sent you quarterly
reminders about your entry, including people named Rose, people with
mtview.ca.us addresses, RFC authors, dead tree authors, and people who
attended the first InterOp in 1986, how many reminders would you get?
In how many different U.S. Census categories do you fit? Many of them
could use a registry so that members could find each other or be found
by other interested parties.
What would you say if many of the many third party RFC repositories
started sending you periodic reminders to update your biographical and
bibliographical entries? So far it seems that only this single
outfit is doing that, and that's part of why I agreed that you might
decide you had or would solicit this bulk mail and so say it is not spam.
But if you don't draw the on principle, how do you draw it at all?
...
in fact, i'll go out on a limb and say that i'd certainly be happy if
the
rfc editor had the resources to maintain such a database.
That's a whole other issue that has nothing to do with this bulk mail.
I think you can make a case that submitting an I-D to the RFC Editor
includes to a solicitation for related bulk mail from the Editor for
at least the life of the I-D. Shepherding an I-D until it gets an
RFC number may also amount to a lifetime solicitation of bulk mail
from the Editor. Thus, if this stuff were sent on behalf of the RFC
Editor maintaining such a database, it would be solicited bulk mail
and so not spam.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com