On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 14:33 -0700, Adam H. Peterson wrote: > I think that's a rather narrow view.
Sure, if narrowly interpreted. > If an old high school buddy sends me a message to catch up with me, > that's unsolicited. I'd say your friendship is a implicit invitation or solicitation. > Likewise, if someone reads one of my conference papers and sends me an > inquiry about how I did the work. Well, did your conference paper include your email? Did you mention it or write it on the white board? Did you invite your audience to visit your website where your address is posted under a "contact me" link? Any of those is an invitation to email you and is therefor welcome. That's a bit different then blindly emailing every like you come across on the web. > Neither of these would count as SPAM, I believe. Ditto. > In order to exclude these, but include what I think is typically > referred to as SPAM, I define it as being unsolicited and either > commercial (motivated somehow by commerce) or bulk (many recipients > receiving materially the same message). The commercial/bulk > requirement is supposed to embody an "indiscriminating" quality, but I > can't think of anything else objective that's more precise than that. Add whatever additional requirements that you would like. SPAM is SPAM. I don't think we should be soft on small time spammers. They use our time and our resources to get their message out in the same way that big commercial boys do. This is similar to why I *hate* telephone solicitors of all kinds; I pay for the line, it is my time, and it my quite they disturb in my living room when they ring my phone. People that go door to door are at least willing to do some work to get their message out. I can respect that. > I'm sure some other people define spam differently, but in many cases > their definition is not useful to me. I'm finding the same to be true ;) In the end, I guess I don't care as much about definitions as I do my INBOX and having my precious and scarce resources respected. 2 more cents, Gabe > Anyway, that's my $0.02. > > Adam -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
