Mike Avery wrote:
> On 23 May 2002 at 12:40, Berg Oswell wrote:
> > David W. Tamkin wrote:
> > > All the more reason that nobody should presume to decide what mail
> > > any other person wants or doesn't want. As long as there are email
> > > recipients who are not sysadmins, spam filtering cannot be
> > > accomplished satisfactorily by blanket rules for the whole site. (I
> > > was going to say "nor at the MTA level," but possibly every user
> > > could get a separate subdomain with a different way of contacting
> > > the smtpd such that every user could configure the MTA uniquely for
> > > his or her incoming mail. But perhaps that would require a separate
> > > IP address for each user's smtpd, and that might render it
> > > impracticable.)
> > I agree; Personally, if it's unsolicited, I don't even read it. Even
> > if someone is sending me extremely well-targeted spam with the deal of
> > a lifetime, I wouldn't do business with someone who resorts to spam
> > email.
> > IMO, the best test of what email to send is simple...did the
> > person affirmatively request the mailing? If not, then it shouldn't
> > be sent.
> That's a pretty tough test. If I applied it to my
> incoming mail, I wouldn't have been able to do my last
> job. I was an editor for a technical magazine. If I
> didn't get notes from people who wanted to become
> writers or to write for us, we wouldn't have had new
> writers. If I didn't get notes from vendors I hadn't
> dealt with before, we wouldn't have been able to review
> any products except those we already knew about.
That's a completely different situation. You're right, as an
editor, you have an expectation of people sending you things out of the
blue. But generally, they are sent to you in your capacity as editor,
have a reasonable reason for sending it to you, and are targeted more on
the magazine than on you personally. This is especially true if you have
an official editor's email address.
But if you did have such an address in addition to a personal
address, and people were sending unsolicited email to your personal
address, then my argument is still a good one.
> Actually, I think it's a pretty simplistic test. I draw
> the line at unsolicited mail sent to many people. If
> someone has a reasonable expectation that I will be
> interested in a piece of email they want to send to me
> as an individual, I am usually willing to receive it. Even
> if I hadn't heard of them before. I view this as part of
> the price I pay for being in the public eye. You say you
> aren't in the public eye? I beg to differ - you just put
> yourself there....
It's not simplistic at all, it's merely common sense. There's a
very large difference between being in the public eye and requesting
commercial reading materials If you are a magazine editor and give your
address out as a contact for the magazine, then you are requesting email
be sent to you that pertains to the magazine. Whether that is from a
vendor, or a writer, or someone with a question is irrelevant, because you
requested all of that, either explicitly or by implication. But by
placing myself in the pubic eye, posting email to list-managers, I am NOT,
under any circumstances, requesting commercial email; If someone wants to
respond to my post privately, then yes, I've requested such by the fact
that it's an expected part of netiquette. But that doesn't give someone
the right to flood my mailbox with spam about things on other topics.
As an example, I don't smoke; Yet I receive an average of 20 spams
a day trying to sell me on everything from humidors to stop-smoking plans.
I didn't request any such email, it's horribly badly-targeted, and there's
no way to get it to stop, since 9 out of 10 of them have forged headers.
I receive an average of 300 spams a day in HTML format; I can't read HTML
email with my chosen mailreader, and the few times I have requested
commercial email, I've both specified that I didn't want my address given
out to anyone else, AND that I requested plain-text only. In the cases
where non-HTML email or non-distribution of my address weren't options, I
simply didn't subscribe.
Of my daily email, I average about 450 emails; Of those, an
average of 30 are things I have asked to receive. On an average day, of
the remaining 420 emails, only 20 are even remotely well-targeted. But
since I haven't requested ANY of those 420 messages, I refuse to do
business with a company that shows such a lack of respect of my privacy
and my time (I spend an average of half an hour sorting my email on a
daily basis).
If I didn't request it, either explicitly or implicitly, I simply
do not want to receive it. And I shouldn't have to, yet there's
thousands of people out there who fail to comprehend that very simple
courtesy. And I refuse to do business with such people.
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