Legitimate volume mail.

[Gabriel Sechan]

>From: Stewart Stremler <bofh at stremler.net>
>>begin  quoting Gabriel Sechan as of Sun, May 02, 2004 at 04:18:38PM -0500:

> > Sure it is.  Spam is unsolcited email.  Period.
>
>So when your long-lost cousin Bubba discovers your email address on the
>Web and sends you a unsolicited email, that's spam?
>
If I have a long lost cousin named Bubba, I assure you I never want to hear 
from him.  Ever.

>
>But if you insist, then your cousin is a spammer, and should have his
>account immediately terminated.  Of course, that destroys one of the basic
>benefits of email, and makes all this whining about spam self-indulgent
>grandstanding, as you should obviously just set up a whitelist and ignore
>everything that doesn't pass. No more spam, ever.
>
>Or, you allow that Bubba's email _isn't_ spam, although it's unsolicited,
>in which case the assertion that "Spam is unsolicted email. Period." is
>simply untrue.
>

No, I disagree that its unsolicited.  If he got my address, either I gave it 
to him once upon a time, gave it to something like classmates where I expect 
contact from it, or have a web ppresence where I've publicized my email for 
legitamate contact purposes.  The only way he could have gotten it is from 
that, which makes it solicited.

> > For that matter, it doesn't have to be email.  I call my junkmail in 
>dead
> > tree format spam.
>
>Oddly enough, there's a perfectly good word for that, too. Your abuse
>of the language and lax standards do not make your personal definition a
>useful common definition.
>
>Junkmail is junkmail. Calling junkmail "spam" tells your listener nothing
>aside from indicating that you're being either pretentious or careless.
>
>It's like a woman claiming that someone ogling her in a bar commited 
>"visual
>rape" -- it's a statement purely for effect, designed to villify another
>party, but it's done in such a way that it diminishes the strength and 
>impact
>of a word that _needs_ to be precise.  Junkmail is junkmail, and *includes*
>spam and UCE; spam-isa-junkmail, but not junkmail-isa-spam.
>

Nope.  You're takiing a nebulously defined word (spam) and trying to say it 
has a strict definition that forces it to be bulk.  It doesn't.  You're the 
one trying to backport a speciic definition onto a word in common use.  The 
term you should be using is "unsolicited  bulk email".  Spam is a general 
term for unwanted push communications.


> > And volume isn't subjective?  Whats the magic number for xpam/not spam.  
>2?
> > 10? 100?
>
>Remember cancelmoose? That's exactly how it worked.

I may regreat saying this, but I have no idea what you're talking about.

>
> >           What if I send n-1, is that spam?
>
>Yup.
>

SO if we decide n=2 is spam, I will send, then n=1 is spam as well.  I win 
by induction!


>
> >                              Volume isn't really objective either.
>
>Sure it is.
>
>You /can/ assign a number. You /can't/ determine if someone would be
>offended beforehand.
>
Yes, but the number you assign is subjective.  So I'm making it subjectively 
1.

Gabe

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