Subject: [Asrg] Mailing List Spam

From: doug campbell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 10:04:05 -0800

snip from wayne...
We, who subscribe to this list, have solicited the trafic that comes
from it.  The email wasn't unsolicited, it was just rude and
off-topic.
...
If this list has too many problems with unwanted (from my point of
view) traffic, I can unsubcribe, just like I subscribed.  The list
owner can (and should) take steps to try and reduce the number of
offtopic posts.
/...snip

So if someone gets too much unwanted (from their point of view)
traffic, they should just unsubscribe (abandon their email address)
and go subscribe somewhere else (get another email address).  Or,
in the case of the list owners, be diligent in censoring the
data entered into the list.

We advertise our email address on our websites and other use them
both for legimate communications to us concerning the topics on
our website and to send us mail [sic] member enlargement ads,
cheap mortgage ads, mature adult content ads, teeth whitener ads,
pharmacutical ads,  etc., and by the above reasoning
we invited those "off topic" advertisements by having an email
address and should not therefore resent them when they arrive in
our mailbox.  We should just be more diligent in deleting the
undesired e-mails from our inbox.  That, I take it, is your position.

Sending an ad for a software business which I neither solicited 
nor desired is spam when it arrives in my mailbox, no matter what
route it took to get there. It is UCE. And having it arrive with the
intriguing title of "Asrg Digest, Vol 19, Issue 6" without the
"ADV" text is certainly not in the spirit of CAN-SPAM, is it?

Now, that's just my gut, ininformed feeling, given that this is a 
mailing list, and what has just been done is the equivalent of
mailing an advertisement to every member of the list. Note that,
the advertisment was duplicated over and over, with multiple
e-mail addresses receiving a pushed copy.  This is a
hallmark of spam/spim, which we certainly recognize.  The
list has been used as a remailer for advertisment.  According
to you, its owners are to blame; I say they are not, any more 
than I would be for bank robbery if my car were 'jacked
and then used to rob one.

If this were a newsgroup, you
would be right according to the wikipedia -- there, newsgroup
spam is defined as excessive cross-posting or repeated
posting of a single message.  Since a newsgroup is 
pull technology (rather than e-mail's push),
pollution of the list of subjects is damaging, because it 
affects another newsgroup reader's ability to discern 
messages worth reading among the information clutter; that's
obviously why, in a newsgroup context, cross/repeated posting
is bad.

The perpetrator of what I and others consider spam has either
made good his stated intention of unsubscribing (which should
be done via an unsubscribe message which we'll never see), or
is watching this all unfold and... who knows? Maybe one of
us will buy his product -- HAHAHAHA.

My 0.16 bits.

UncleSmrgol

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: wayne <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:41:44 -0600

> data entered into the list.

You do not need to abandon your email address, you just need to
unsubscribe from the mailing list you subscribed to.  The confirmation
process when signing up to a mailing list makes sure that the mailing
list traffic is solicited.  I've never given up an email address
because of the spam problem and I don't recommend that people do so.

> our website [...]

That is not a mailing list.  By putting your email address on your
website you are soliciting certain types of on-topic emails, not for
everything.  Emails that are off-topic and are bulk are therefore
spam.

Similarly, when I place my email address into emails going to this
list, I am soliciting private comments about these subjects, I am not
soliciting for any and all email from someone who picks/scrapes up my
email address from this list.

The subject of "what is spam" has been discussed to death in many
forums.  I am firmly in the camp of spam is any and all Unsolicited
Bulk Email (UBE).  There is a little bit of grey are about what it
means to be "unsolicited" and "bulk", but again, these issues have
been discussed to death.  I'm not sure that re-hashing them is really
that productive, so I think I'll drop out of the discussion now.

-wayne