Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt?

John Payne john at sackheads.org
Mon Oct 29 05:26:02 UTC 2001


On Sun, Oct 28, 2001 at 04:15:42PM -0500, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> To more precisely define it, UCE is what I care about, those three
> words, Unsolicited Commercial E-mail fairly precisely define the
> bad type of e-mail.  If the methods employed to block UCE block
> solicited commercial e-mail, or any form of non-commercial e-mail
> then we need to find better methods.  (Note, this leaves a small
> potential problem, in that people promoting religious beliefs and
> the like might attempt to bulk e-mail under the guise of it being
> non-commercial.  For now I will assume any interesting entity must
> have real $$'s invested, and therefor fits a broad definition of
> commercial.  If it believed this would be a real problem I'll think
> about it and form an opinion.)

I am trying to be good :)  If you change one word in your definition...
you cover the "small potential problem"  (which has been seen already)
without losing anything.

Unsolicited Bulk E-mail.

I don't care if its Commercial, Religious, Charity or other, if its
bulk and unsolicited, its wrong.

The example that immediately jumps to mind was (if memory serves)
May or June 2000... a little girl Sarah Payne was abducted in the UK.
After a few days, people all over the world started getting spammed
asking for help.  There was no evidence that she left the country, 
yet a mass mailing went out with no regards to geography.

Did I feel bad for Sarah's family?  Yes, especially as I had driven
up and down the road she was abducted near several times around the
time she went missing.  Were the spammers well meaning?  Yes.
My problem with it?  "It does not scale".  How many kids go missing
every week from somewhere in the world?

-- 
John Payne      http://sackheads.org/jpayne/    john at sackheads.org
http://sackheads.org/uce/                     Fax: +44 870 0547954
        To send me mail, use the address in the From: header



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