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I'm close to finish a reporting tool that will send out a
daily notification to the local recipient if new messages was hold on the
mailserver with a final weight slightly above the hold weight (up to now we
review this messages regulary and can find an average of one false positive each
day by around 15k delivered messages)
The notification contains only a link to a webpage where
the user can see his hold messages and klick on it to requeue
them.
I'm curios what my customers will consider "not spam"
:-)
Markus
This was the subject of a recent off-list discussion between myself
and Pete where there was a perception that my definition of spam was too
conservative or rather my definition of ham was too liberal. While I
readily admit that in practice, I do personally wish to block many
fewer things that I consider to be legitimate first-party advertising than
most do, I don't necessarily get the impression that the definitions that I
use are all that much off the mark. I have also found that the folks at
BondedSender think that I am some sort of anti-advertising zealot for
reporting what is near universally what we would consider to be spam, so it
does go both ways :) So I wanted to throw this topic out for some
feedback and other presentations of one's own definitions and maybe learn
something in the process.
First off, I naturally follow the basic
definition of spam that is widely promoted where spam is both
unsolicited and bulk. What causes such wide derivation from this common
definition however is the sub-definition of what constitutes unsolicited, and
the gray area that exists beyond this definition due to abuse.
The
definition that I use to qualify advertising or newsletter related ham is as
follows:
This definition starts with me treating things as ham if it
comes from a first-party relationship with the sender, however there are
some exceptions as follows:
- Evidence of the first-party having harvested significant numbers of
recipients in the list, i.e.: Reunion(dot)com.
- Refusal to honor opt-outs.
- Having no opt-out mechanism for repeated E-mails that are advertising
related.
- Third-party ads being sent by first-party source when they are not the
primary reason for a membership, example: Sportsline's partner specials
- Very widespread abuse of a particular direct-marketing provider where
most customers of a service are spamming, example: Uptilt.
- Selling subscriber lists from one otherwise legitimate site to
spammers or brokering lists for spamming, example: many joke sites.
It's my belief that many would consider this
definition to be agreeable (please speak up if you don't), however I am near
certain that in practice there is a good amount of derivation from this even
among those that would at least initially agree with the above.
The
issue of applying this in practice to me means that I try not to apply my own
emotions or judgments of value to a particular sender. This means that I
treat advertising from J.Crew just the same on my system as E-mail from
Orbitz, though I personally find Orbitz and most other travel sites to be
annoying with their frequency and low in value to the recipient. The
trick here is that I have found no evidence of harvesting from either source,
and they both practice default-opt-in to their newsletters from their
customer-base, and they both seemingly honor opt-outs, so the only difference
that I perceive is the subject matter of the E-mails. I have found that
many administrators will blacklist Orbitz and even report them to SpamCop,
while this is less commonly the case with J.Crew. So the determining
factor that is often used regardless of a stated or intended definition
appears to be a value judgment placed on the content of the E-mails, either
consciously or unconsciously. Would anyone agree or disagree with this
perception?
One last note: personally I find the industry standard
practice of default-opt-in for customer lists to be disturbing, but if one was
to consider that alone as a qualifier of spam, over 99% of advertising
messages that pass my definition above would fail the much tighter definition
of double-opt-in for requesters only. Since this has become the standard
practice in the entire industry, I allow for it just so long as they follow my
rules since I definitely have customers (including myself) that do wish to
receive some of what is sent to me without initially requesting it, and my
customers have the power to opt-out and report any abuse to me for appropriate
action.
Please add your comments or even your own
definitions.
Thanks,
Matt
--
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MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro.
http://www.mailpure.com/software/
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- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: How to define "spam" an... Markus Gufler
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