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

[Roland Perry]

In message <9C0669AA-E179-4378-B5C1-F64CF55F1152 at hserus.net>, at 
20:22:48 on Sun, 23 Dec 2012, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> 
writes
>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 **

Agreed, that this is the best definition.

>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.

Although I was careful not to use the example of a job offer, rather 
than a job opportunity (and yes, I'm fully aware that many of the ones 
circulating on the net are scams).

> 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 "good spam", to use my earlier definition.

>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.

In Europe the pressure from "big business" has been to consider that all 
your previous customers have by default given permission, and they need 
to "Opt out" to demonstrate their lack of consent. While many anti-Spam 
activists regard even this as unacceptable, on balance I think the vast 
majority of the problem is elsewhere - despite a personal view that I'd 
rather even ex-customer mailings were opt-in.

>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.

Indeed, and I worked with ISPs on these very issues for several years, 
helping to publish some of the most respected codes of practice (eg the 
LINX/RIPE BCP).
-- 
Roland Perry

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