Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 07:59:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Sam Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Gary Foote asked;
>So, what is in dispute here? Is our practice of sending precisely
>targeted autoresponses by e-mail considered spamming?
The keyword here, Mr Foote, is UNSOLICITED. If I have not requested
it and it ends up in my mailbox--then it's SPAM.
I haven't seen the autoresponse mail in question so I don't know if I'd
consider it spam, but I disagree with your reasons for saying it must be
spam.
If Gary's explaination is accurate, what is happening is, someone posts to
a list to announce a new list and then he sends back an acknowledgement
that the post was received and describes the other features associated with
that site.
If the explaination is off, then perhaps the situation is that the other
features are commercial ones or that there is no reason to expect an
acknowldgement from your post. In other words, there is context involved
here. The mere fact that there was an autoresponse does not make it spam.
This particular situation may or may not be an example of spam; I don't
know enough to decide.
If sending an unsolicited autoresponce is spam, then what about my vacation
program? When I go out of town and don't have email access, I set the
vacation program to send anyone who mails to me a letter I've prewritten.
Back when I ran my mailing list out of my personal account I would
occaionsionally get complaints (or just comments) that I was sending list
instructions to people who weren't writing about hte list. Plus I would
put a couple lines of personal info in the letters, like when I was way
behind on email due to a death in the family, or giving my dates of travel
when I'm out of town.
Of all the people who made comments about my vacation message, not a single
person considered it to be spam. It never came up. Note also that people
got exactly one message until I reset the program (which I did each time I
changed the message). [Gary take note: unix can do this easily...keep a
list of the recipients and only send to people who haven't already gotton
one. Erase that list every few months or when you update the message.]
Anyway, I hope you see my point. I don't know if Gary Foote is sending out
spam or not, but the fact that the messages were techincally unsolicited
does not, in and of itself, make them spam. You have to have more
information to make that claim. And, trust me, I'm quite anti-spam; I
don't accept "bulkmailers" claims responsibility and I don't accept
loopholes.
Cyndi
--
_______________________________________________________________________________
"There's nothing wrong with me. Maybe there's Cyndi Norman
something wrong with the universe." (ST:TNG) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
__________________________________________________ http://www.best.com/~cnorman
