vern - one could just as easily argue that the 2K blather you just dumped
into my mailbox is both unsolicited and bulk.
talk about the proverbial mountain the mole hill.
my advice: get some perspective or get better pharmaceuticals...
/mtr
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vernon Schryver" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 13:16
Subject: Re: networksorcery.com spam
> > From: "Marshall T. Rose" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > ...
> > vern - as much as i appreciate the modern dictum that "everyone is a
> > villain", i don't think it would kill you every now and then to look for
a
> > benign explanation to things.
>
> Spam is not about villainy, fraud, or public services. It is only
> about consent to receive bulk mail and scaling for individual mailboxes.
>
> If you don't make the content of spam irrelevant, then you slide down
> a slope that prevents you from complaining about any spam or enforcing
> anti-spam terms of service. if you excuse benign unsolicited bulk
> mail because it serves a public good, such as about rolling blackouts
> or IIS worms, then when can you ever complain about spam? For every
> unsolicited bulk message, there is at least one person and usually
> many who honestly believe that it is in the public interest or the
> interest of its targets, even if it porn, a chain letter, or one of
> those fraudulent but not illegal (as far as I know) $25 vanity Who's
> Who listings. If you allow one person to use unsolicited bulk mail
> to maintain a registry of people who live in your neighborhood, or
> write RFC's, then how can you criticize or terminate the accounts of
> others who are send unsolicited bulk mail for other purposes?
>
> The evil in spam is not advertising or crass commercialism, but scaling.
> If 1% of the ~20,000,000 U.S. companies sent monthly reminders of their
> existence to 1% of the mailboxes on the net, how many messages would you
> receive daily? What if those reminders came from all over the world? If
> every reasonable Who's Who that might want to list you sent you quarterly
> reminders about your entry, including people named Rose, people with
> mtview.ca.us addresses, RFC authors, dead tree authors, and people who
> attended the first InterOp in 1986, how many reminders would you get?
> In how many different U.S. Census categories do you fit? Many of them
> could use a registry so that members could find each other or be found
> by other interested parties.
>
> What would you say if many of the many third party RFC repositories
> started sending you periodic reminders to update your biographical and
> bibliographical entries? So far it seems that only this single
> outfit is doing that, and that's part of why I agreed that you might
> decide you had or would solicit this bulk mail and so say it is not spam.
> But if you don't draw the on principle, how do you draw it at all?
>
>
> > ...
> > in fact, i'll go out on a limb and say that i'd certainly be happy if
the
> > rfc editor had the resources to maintain such a database.
>
> That's a whole other issue that has nothing to do with this bulk mail.
>
> I think you can make a case that submitting an I-D to the RFC Editor
> includes to a solicitation for related bulk mail from the Editor for
> at least the life of the I-D. Shepherding an I-D until it gets an
> RFC number may also amount to a lifetime solicitation of bulk mail
> from the Editor. Thus, if this stuff were sent on behalf of the RFC
> Editor maintaining such a database, it would be solicited bulk mail
> and so not spam.
>
>
> Vernon Schryver [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
