On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 17:51, Franz J Ehrengruber (iptelenet) wrote:
In my opinion there is NO difference between unsolicited bulk email and
solicited bulk email. Both are SPAM as far as I'm concerned,
I've never before encountered a non-spammer that claims to be spamming
me. It's always the other way around.
Such a claim just begs for a response. :-)
Opt-in mailing lists by definition send out solicited bulk mail. The
spf-discuss mailing list is an opt-in mailing list, and it obviously
sends out solicited bulk mail.
If you personally consider solicited bulk mail to be spam (lowercase),
then you're contributing to the spam problem yourself by posting to this
mailing list. You are a source to a multi-stage spam relay.
So what can one do to address the problem?
As an unrepentant spammer, in order to protect you from yourself, I
would suggest adding yourself to any internal block lists that your
organization maintains--the idea being that you would want to prevent
your outgoing mail servers from accepting or relaying messages from any
IP address owned by or controlled by your organization, thus cutting off
the problem at the source, well, at least that part of the problem under
your control.
(As an aside, I would hold off on any well-intentioned efforts to
contact the various block list maintainers and request to be added to
their databases. They all have their own very strict definitions and
guidelines of what they do and do not consider to be spam, and they have
a lot of experience with people trying to get them to make special-case
exceptions to their rules "just for them." It is unlikely that you will
be able to convince them that you meet their definitions of what it
takes to be a spammer, no matter how well you meet your own. They are
peculiarly exclusive in that way.)
--
Mark Shewmaker
mark(_at_)primefactor(_dot_)com