Subject: RE: [Asrg] Another criteria for "what is spam"...

From: "Peter Kay" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 13:09:35 -1000

> 
> I trust you are not supporting the parts of those definitions 
> that are from the equivelants of thieves trying to warp the 
> definition of burglary to give them permission to be be 
> anywhere and so always innocent.  Spammers and organizations 
> that would send a lot of spam if it did not have its current 
> stench define solicited as "until you do a confirmed opt-out, 
> and then only for a few months."
> 

No. I'm not supporting that. I probably used the wrong wording here. Let
me restate:

is Internet email inherently trusted or is it untrusted?

Is all email considered unsolicited until the recipient says otherwise? 

> 
> There are big differences between capitalists who in 
> principle can understand enlightened self-interest and the 
> tragedy of the commons and parasites that claim a right to 
> steal from their sales targets.
> 

While that may be true, the fact is that Dell and Verisign have still
sent you email that you consider unsolicited. So I feel that my earlier
statement of capitalism + SMTP =  spam problem.

> Note that the Internet was in the hands of capitalists for 
> almost as many years before email spam became a problem as it 
> has been since spam became noticable.
> 
> 

Are you sure about that? When was commercial Internet use OK? When did
Canter & Siegel send the first spam?  Maybe you mean "spam became
unbearable" instead of "noticable".  1 spam = noticable. 100 =
unbearable.

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---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 17:58:13 -0600 (MDT)

> From: "Peter Kay" <[email-masked]>

> ...

Trust is gone, just as it evaporated from voice telephones a long time ago.

> Is all email considered unsolicited until the recipient says otherwise? 

Some kinds of mail has implicit consent.  Almost everyone who has a
public mailbox welcomes or at least consents to non-bulk, inoffensive
mail.  There is a good analogy between the calls you implicitly consent
to receive at a "published" (i.e. not "unlisted") telephone number
and the mail you implicitly consent to receive at an email address
that you have published in directories or divulged to individuals or
organizations.

The telephone calls that bother people are similar to mail spam.

> ...

Canter&Siegal sent netnews or usenet spam long before email spam
became a problem.

Plenty of commercial use of the Internet was OK even in the 1980's,
as many of us worked for commercial outfits at the time can attest.
That was true not only of the baldly commercial parts of the net but
also on the NSFNET provided you could offer some kind of reasonable excuse
that whatever you were doing was "in support of research or education,"
even if you were making a profit at it or only selling goods or services
to other commercial outfits.  I connected a UNIX vendor to the net
via CSNET using a leased line to facilities run by another computer
vendor in 1986.

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap1/net_hist.html says there were
1,000,000 hosts in 1992.  I doubt they were all in the hands of
socialists or whatever are other than capitalists.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]
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