AW: [governance] [] US, UK and Canada refuse to sign UN's internet treaty

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Roland, this thread can quickly go circular - having experience of several similar threads that have led to this rather uneasy consensus definition.  Over a decade or more, elsewhere.

** Unsolicited + Bulk **

If I email you out of the blue and give you - and you alone - a job offer .. a personalized one to one email - that is absolutely not spam.  However if I for example buy a list of email addresses of supposed job seekers, and use a mail merge sort of software to create form letters - Dear Roland, Dear Suresh, and so on, with the same text - and send that out, in bulk, unsolicited  ..

After that, there's spam you complain about and spam that you sometimes buy from.  Suppose that's a list of say a million addresses.  Maybe a fraction of a percent of people who actually get sent that email will receive it - the rest would be detected by spam filters, or rejected because the recipient address doesn't exist ..  And out of that fraction of a percent, maybe another fraction of a percent will actually think they need, say, a sexual organ enlarged, or think that they'll actually get to date beautiful women if they reply to the spam.  Or maybe, to pick a more mainstream example, actually choose one major brand over another for their christmas shopping

That fraction of a percent of a fraction of a percent is enough to more than repay the costs of the spammer's campaign multiple times over.  Which is why spam is extremely popular, and which is why several marketers have been extremely averse to suggestions from privacy rights advocates, and only (till some years back) grudgingly receptive to suggestions from ISPs that they should adopt marketing best practices that respect an individual users' consent to send them email [optin], rather than sending unsolicited offers.   

ISPs tend to carry a rather larger stick than assorted civil society privacy advocates do, especially if they have multiple million users, several of whom report the marketer's campaign as spam.

--srs (iPad)

On 23-Dec-2012, at 18:59, Roland Perry <roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:

> In message <8307243E-F886-4B76-85A3-BA00C93318C3 at hserus.net>, at 17:13:11 on Sun, 23 Dec 2012, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> writes
>> Do note unsolicited / unwanted to address your comment about receptiveness
> 
> I'm very receptive to many unsolicited emails, especially ones offering me a [genuine] job or sending me seasonal greetings. People also get unwanted emails one-to-one, for example when being stalked or harassed by an ex-partner.
> 
> As you said earlier, there's a need to involve the concept of "bulk", but even that fails, if someone sends an Xmas card to their entire group of friends.
> 
> R.
> 
>> --srs (iPad)
>> 
>> On 23-Dec-2012, at 15:37, Roland Perry <roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> In message <010601cde0ae$930397f0$b90ac7d0$@hellmonds>, at 02:41:05 on Sun, 23 Dec 2012, Peter H. Hellmonds <peter.hellmonds at hellmonds.eu> writes
>>>> There are a number of references throughout the text, notably under heading
>>>> 2.1 "What is spam?":
>>>> 
>>>> "Several stakeholders have given definitions of spam, and although there are
>>>> common points, there is still no universally accepted definition. Broadly
>>>> speaking, spam includes all electronic messages that are unsolicited or
>>>> unwanted, sent to a large number of users (bulk) without regard to the
>>>> identity of the individual user, usually having commercial purposes, and
>>>> that can include viruses that propagate via e-mail, or fraud and scam
>>>> mechanisms."
>>> 
>>> Curiously, this definition is almost the opposite of the previous one, concentrating as it does on "without regard to the identity of the individual user".
>>> 
>>> Using the same terminology as my previous email, it's mainly "bad spam" which has that characteristic.
>>> 
>>> "Good spam" is generally[1] targeted at specific people[2] as is my last category of "noise"[3].
>>> 
>>> But if they modified the definition to "without regard to the *receptiveness*[4] of the individual user", they'd be quite close to the mark.
>>> 
>>> [1] Although sometimes when "clueless marketers" buy lists of people to spam, those lists aren't very clean.
>>> 
>>> [2] For example, I bought a laptop online about six years ago, and still get an email once a week asking me if I want to buy another one, listing their current special offers. Definitely targeted to former customers but also definitely spam.
>>> 
>>> [3] Another way of looking at "noise" is that it's people cluelessly 'marketing' their ideas.
>>> 
>>> [4] Whether or not the email is "welcomed" by the recipient. However, this is such a subjective matter that it's virtually impossible to build a policy based on the concept. As a proxy, policy often uses: "did the recipient give their permission (implicitly or explicitly) to receive the email." Although that leaves many edge-cases, including the unsolicited receipt of welcome news like a job opportunity or an Xmas greeting.
>>> --
>>> Roland Perry
>>> 
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> 
> -- 
> Roland Perry

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