On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 20:21, John Keown wrote:
I am only talking about the pass. It depends on what you consider spam.
If I define spam as commercial email then 90% of the spf pass are spam.
Examples are staples, Fredrick's of Hollywood, natural vitamins, etc.
The actual email by humans were mostly from aol. I looked at less than an
hours worth and this was over 2,000 that passed spf.
It seems that the majority of the adopters of spf are commercial email
marketers - mailing offers to list. Not sure how many are optin or verified
optin.
But for sure 90% of the email that passed spf was advertising.
This is hardly surprising; AOL is requiring "legitimate bulk mailers" to
have SPF in order to remain on the AOL whitelist. Advertising mail is
only spam if it's unsolicited, so it's not fair to say that all of this
is spam.
My personal opinion is that spam is "Unsolicited Bulk Email" and there
are many in the anti-spam community that agree with that definition,
e.g.
http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html
http://www.crynwr.com/spam/definition.html
There is nothing wrong with solicited bulk commercial email at all
(provided of course it was solicited by the person it's being sent to,
but there's where all the arguments about double/confirmed/etc. opt-in
start). I'm not an anti-commerce radical ;-)
Paul.
--
Paul Howarth <paul(_at_)city-fan(_dot_)org>