Subject: RE: [ASRG] 2b. Public Trace Data

From: Andreas Saurwein <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 16:35:22 -0300

At 6/10/2003 16:00 Monday, you wrote:
>There were some discussions about creating a reviewer process for cleaning
>the data further.
>
>I do question the 15% value. Mainly because I question the definition of
>spam that you used. For example, joke forward and virus mail seem to qualify
>as unwanted email. Also depending on the mailing lists that you are speaking
>of, they could qualify as unwanted email.

This brings us probably back to "The Question": what is spam, or what is 
not spam.
While i believe that joke forwards may be "unwanted" mail, they are not 
spam (UCE, UBE). People should be able to cope with that on a person to 
person level.

Mailing lists, as found on the spamarchive, are mostly (I guess) lists to 
which the people have subscribed, time ago, but do not want anymore. 
Instead of unsubscribing (which IS painful for some lists, I know) they add 
those lists, senders, etc, to their blacklists, or manually forward as spam.

Virus mail is definitely unwanted, but also does not classify as spam 
(UCE), maybe as UBE - not sure about that.

>The two approaches that we discussed were a) re-run the messages through
>anti-spam tools to confirm they are spam and b) set up an interface so that
>volunteers can review and vote on messages. With a decent number of
>volunteers, one could get through a fair amount of messages daily. We did an
>initial poll for volunteers early on and there were some individuals that
>expressed interest. We need someone to create the interface that allows
>review.

I think that b) is not reasonable. It might work for a short time until the 
volunteers get bored. Which leaves us with a).

Cheers
Andreas

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

---

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2003 21:03:25 -0400

Andreas Saurwein wrote:

> Mailing lists, as found on the spamarchive, are mostly (I guess) lists 
> to which the people have subscribed, time ago, but do not want anymore. 
> Instead of unsubscribing (which IS painful for some lists, I know) they 
> add those lists, senders, etc, to their blacklists, or manually forward 
> as spam.
> 

That is why the group charter has stayed away from defining what spam 
is. We want to introduce the notion of consent into the email system to 
allow users to consent or deny consent to every single mail message, and 
groups and categories of mail messages. Lack of a strong definition is a 
problem for efforts such as the SpamArchive.org. The technical 
considerations document 
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-crocker-spam-techconsider-02.txt) 
states that:

"    For most working discussions, the term "Unsolicited
      Bulk Email" is sufficient.  The salient point that it
      is a mass-mailing ensures that discussion covers the
      broadest concern of the user and provider
      communities. Mail that is not in some real sense "bulk"
      cannot flood networks or mailboxes. Essentially all
      mail that people object to, as "spam", is bulk. For
      example practically all objectionable advertising mail
      is also bulk, although modern techniques for targeted
      advertising can permit extensive content or address
      tailoring. "Bulk" is usually very difficult for an
      individual recipient to prove, but almost always easy
      to recognize in practice.
"

The working definition used in that document concentrates on the "bulk" 
aspect of spam which could be a problem when dealing with lists which 
are also "bulk" by nature as you described above.