On Tue, 09 Aug 2005, Justin Mason said: > BTW, before we go too far down this rabbit-hole, everyone please note > that actually, the SpamAssassin project *does* have its own definition > of spam: that being Unsolicited Bulk Email.
There was a wonderful old post on news.admin.net-abuse.misc (message-id <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) that put this point very well, albeit in a Usenet context: > What is spam? Spam is the same thing lots and lots of times. [...] > We do not care what is in a spam. We do not care if it is in the right > place or the wrong place. If we cared, that would be bad. If we did not > like a post, we could say it is bad, so it is spam. Or we could say it > is in the wrong place, so it is spam. That would be worse than spam. So > we say a thing is spam if it is the same thing lots and lots of times. These days, there's an exception for legitimate, double-opt-in mailing lists, but that's all, I think. Individuals sending customized one-off emails are generally not spam in my eyes, annoying or not --- but this is somewhat subjective, as it's sometimes hard to tell if a message is individually customized from the recipient's POV, and I hear that some 419 scammers actually send their scams by typing them in one-by-one at net cafes and the like. -- `Tor employs several thousand editors who they keep in dank subterranean editing facilities not unlike Moria' -- James Nicoll
