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Onsdag den 16. juni 2004 19:01 skrev Seth Goodman:
I'm not sure I agree that it has to be subjective, since spam is
more about behavior than content.
Usually, I mention these definitions of spam when asked:
1) "Unwanted e-mails are spam." If somebody gets subscribed to
spf-discuss, but doesn't understand how to get off the list, all
e-mails from this list is spam.
2) "E-mails sent to many people who didn't ask for it." This includes
a lot of e-mails from a company to it's customers, but not all. The
difference might be, whether you checked a "Yes, I want to get
e-mails" checkbox somewhere.
3) "The law defines, what e-mails are spam". This doesn't apply to all
countries, of course, but those laws rarely reflect people's
intuitive idea of what spam is.
In my e-mail system, the following e-mails end in my spam folder:
- - E-mails sent from several companies that I've told that I wanted
e-mail from, but I've decided otherwise later, but cannot get off
their list.
- - Viruses. I didn't ask for them, and it's surely not ham.
- - Business proposals sent specifically to me that I don't care about.
I don't need more advertising and I don't need money so much that I'm
willing to become a reseller for stupid products.
- - E-mails telling me, that somebody has sent a virus to somebody else,
forging my sender e-mail address.
- - E-mails from friends that say, that "in order to prevent this and
this virus, delete a very important system file from your Windows
computer". Even though they are sent actively by a friend, my
spamfilter (popfile) knows the content and redirects it directly to
my spamfolder. And yes, I still consider those people friends ;-)
SpamHaus has what I think is a
very good working definition. To be spam, it must be both
unsolicited and bulk.
The basic thing is, that we disagree on the definition. There are many
definitions that work, but I still think that the best definitions
are:
- - Spam e-mails are those e-mails you don't want to receive.
- - Spam e-mails are defined by the receiver.
At our service, we have several customers who complain, that they
cannot receive "I want a bigger dick" and "Buy more viagra" e-mails.
They don't want spam, but they want those e-mails.
They also have a technical definition of spam that sounds like it
was drafted by a bunch of lawyers. That one is pretty specific,
and my recollection is that the criteria were objective, though
incomprehensible to mere engineers :)
In other words, an unusable definition :-)
Lars.
- --
Surftown
European shared hosting provider
http://www.surftown.com/
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