Ron Guilmette wrote,
| Spam E-mail for most folks is just bulk unsolicited E-mail. It doesn't
| matter if it is ``commercial'' in the sense of trying to directly get your
| money or not.
|
| I have gotten spammed by people trying to elected.
And those people were sending it for their own gain.
| I have gotten spammed by people trying to make me a Christian.
| I have gotten spammed by people trying to make me a Hindu.
And those people were sending it for their own gain ... to score points with
those above them in their hierarchy or with their deities.
| Recently, I have gotten spammed by people trying to tell me what swell
| people the Serbs really are.
Again, writing for their own benefit, not for yours.
| All this stuff was spam, even though none of it was clearly ``commercial''
| in nature.
Being "commercial" is not the issue. Being for the sender's benefit regard-
less of the recipient's, or even to the detriment of the recipient if he or
she goes along with it [greater detriment than the cost of receiving the
messages], was the issue.
| Likewise, if someone sent you a message saying ``Who is burried in Grant's
| Tomb?'' IF I and a million other people got that too, I can assure you
| that most people would consider it spam if they had no prior connection
| to or relationship with the sender.
Then they'd disagree with me on the definition of spam. Yes, I'd agree that
it's rude and annoying and wrong, of course.
| Fortunately, there are other ways to let people know they their local
| mail server is an open relay that is listed on the IMRSS list of open
| relays.
[Ron lists some ways, and one was this:]
| Another way is to hack Sendmail so that each time it gets a message from
| an IMRSS-listed open relay server, it accepts the message but sends what
| amounts to an auto-responder response to the original message sender saying
| something like ``Hay! Your local mail server is being run in a substantially
| stupid and dangerous way! It is listed on the IMRSS list of open relays and
| as a result, mail from you may be blocked at many sites in the future. You
| should tell you local (lame) mail admin about this right away!''
| I will be providing Sendmail patches to implement this one the IMRSS web
| site in the near future.
Please explain something: if someone gets mail through an open relay and
reports it to IMRSS, and then IMRSS sends out a form letter to the insecure
site to tell it that it is on IMRSS's list of sites running open relays, you
call it unsolicited bulk email. But if your site gets mail from that relay
and it sends an autoresponse to the insecure site saying the same thing, that
is different?
