On 2010-02-24 18:39 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
Steve Holden<st...@holdenweb.com> writes:
Spam is, at least from my point of view, UCE: unsolicited commercial
e-mail. So anything that isn't commercial (like those "send these to
ten of your friends" emails) isn't spam (but it might just as well
be).
That excludes things like the religious screeds, or any other one-way
"get this message in front of as many eyeballs as possible" message.
Spam is better defined as unsolicited bulk messaging. Whether it's
commercial in nature is irrelevant. The content is relevant only in that
it's unsolicited by the vast majority of its many recipients.
That said, in the context of USENET or mailing lists, a single off-topic post to
a single group/list from a regular contributor is not usually considered "bulk
messaging" or "spam". There is already a perfectly fine word for that:
"off-topic". Only when it gets cross-posted excessively or repeated verbatim
indiscriminately does it usually get designated spam.
I think there is an important distinction to be made between isolated off-topic
messages and spam. It's not just about finding commonly agreed meanings of terms
in aid of clear communication. There is a substantive difference. The repetitive
nature of spam dictates what you can do about it. With spam, you can killfile
people, or filter out certain hosts, or use statistical filters, or require
registration or first-post moderation, etc. With the occasional off-topic post
from a regular, you ask them not to do it again and subject them to unending
threads about what spam is or isn't.
But you only break out the comfy chair for the very worst of the offenders.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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