David Mandel wrote: > What is SPAM? I mean the other day I spent out 9 postings to people > I have never met asking about consulting opportunities. These were > targeted to people in key positions in a certain field and each posting > was slightly personalized, but they weren't very different. > Is this SPAM? I could agree either way. Should this type of activity > be illegal? I don't think so. I sent these manually. Would it be > SPAM if I automated the process and sent it to 9 people? How about if I > sent this posting to 25,000 people or 250,000,000 people? The point is > SPAM would be hard to define for legal purposes.
Suppose that in some alternate universe you had to pay a token amount, say, $0.05 or $0.10, to send a message to a stranger. And strangers had to pay to send mail to you. In this universe, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to spam a million strangers, and less than a dollar to send it to nine people. (This alternate universe is called the US Postal Service, except the USPS thinks *everyone* is a stranger. (-: ) Would you like to see a similar cost structure in email? If it meant never seeing another ad for penis enlargement, would you pay to send your email (to strangers)? (To me, this is a no-brainer. I'd gladly pay a lot more for 100% effective spam filtering. But I want to hear some dissent.) > I have several friends who run very tight reverse address checks to > block SPAM. They only allow incoming mail from the ip of the MX > record of the FROM domain. Unfortunately, I have trouble sending them > mail they want, because like many others I send mail from a different > machine than I use to recieve mail. I suppose I could relay off of > the proper machine, but this has draw backs as well. In any case, > these friends attempts to block SPAM have blocked some of their friends > and customers as well. Technological fixes won't fix spam. Half-baked technological fixes won't work either. -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
