Here is the point: UBE/Spamming is never acceptable, no matter what the
greater good served. Floods, fires, starving or missing children, wars,
disease, death, pestilence, etc., none of these justify UBE. IMPORTANT
things like this happen every day. And I believe that the net standard is
that UBE is unacceptable, no matter what the content of the message.
Compared to the above world shaking political events, whether your business
succeeds or fails and whether you do a little good for list owners or a lot
of good for list owners and users is, unfortunately, a small thing. It is
up to you to define a business model that does not use Spam as one of its
linchpins. If you can't, your business is not acceptable by net standards
and should not exist.
As someone posted here the last time we went around on this (and convinced
me), you don't define UBE by content, you define it by behavior. Failure
to do that puts you into free speech issues and that simply does not work.
What is you behavior? You are generating messages robotically. They are
being generated from a list of harvested (and, I assume, imputed) e-mail
addresses. You are sending them to a lot of people. You are sending them
to people who have not established a relationship with you or your company
and asked for these messages. (The rate that you are sending them at, how
many any individual gets, and/or what triggers them is immaterial). You
are therefore sending UBE/Spam.
It happens to be commercial UBE. You are in a business and the mail is
being sent to promote your business.
At 12:35 PM 4/14/99 -0700, Ariel Poler is said to have written:
>Probably a bigger issue with an approach that would only include lists whose
>owners proactively contact us is that we would not be able to offer what we
>believe is a valuable service to the email list community. Most people agree
>(I believe) that services like Yahoo!, Lycos and HotBot have made the Web a
>much better place. Yet those services would not exist if they had only
>included web sites whose owners proactively contacted them with instructions
>to be included in their directories. These services don't even give web site
>owners any notification that they have been included in their directories,
>or much control over their information.
The assertion that Yahoo, etc, would not exist unless people contacted them
to list is interesting, but, I believe, untrue. Last I heard, lots of
people make money by submitting your site to search engines. I get several
spams per week on this subject...if search engine submission was required,
(as opposed to search engine spidering), then people would likely be even
more vigorous about this submission. There would probably be sites that
made it through advertising that provided the service of submission.....
At first, I believed that the gathering of this mailing list information
was bad. I now believe I was wrong. I put the information about these
lists into a publicly accessible autoresponder. The fact that someone
indexes it is no different than someone indexing a web page.
>We realize that email lists are quite different from web sites (that is why
>we are building a service dedicated to lists). Because of this, and of our
>respect towards list owners and strong believe in their ownership of their
>lists' information, we decided it was important to contact list owners and
>give them control over their lists' information - even thought our directory
>has been built by consolidating previously existing public directories.
Where you got the original listings from is totally irrelevant.
But let's break from the this and look at what you are, in fact, trying to
do with your UBE.
The UBE is *not* simply a notification. It is a solicitation. You want
people to enable their list to work with your service. Let's quote from a
spam I got from you a while back:
|One of our users has subscribed to your list from the Topica Directory
|of Email Lists. We would like to offer this subscriber, as well as
|future subscribers to your list, the ability to read your lists's
|messages through our web site.
In other words, this has nothing to do with notification, and everything to
do with your trying to get me to give permission for you to use my
compilation copyright.
Thus, I think you are attempting, to put it charitably, to cloud the waters
with your last paragraph. You are attempting to establish a business
relationship with the list owner. Notification is not the issue. Spam is
the issue.
>We realize there is no perfect answer. We are making a very sincere effort
>at balancing all of these issues in a way that best serves the entire email
>list owner community. We will continue to do so, and will certainly
>incorporate your feedback. Thank you.
I want to know how you define your unsolicited, robotic attempts to get me
to sign up with you as anything other than spam. Can you give me any
definition of spam that anyone other than a spammer could agree with that
would include other robotically generated solicitations but would not
include yours? Is my -owner address somehow subject to spamming while my
individual address is not? I do not buy that.
The only model I could suggest would be that you could index people's lists
and wait for them to contact you to OK your bulk e-mail or your interfacing
with their lists. Of course, this would significantly slow the start of
your business. If it can't stand that slower start, you need to re-examine
your business model.
And, frankly, if you don't redefine your business model to exclude
spamming, then I would support adding topica to the RBL.
--
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
That which does kill us makes us smell stronger, after a few days, anyway.
Nick Simicich mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] or (last choice)
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html -- Stop by and Light Up The World!
