Can we, first, get a common sense definition of spam?

Pretty please?

I don't understand the rationale behind most proposed anti-spam legislation, since much spam is already illegal (since it's promoting some scam or other), and obviously the people who are doing it are not being caught. A lot of it comes from outside the US anyway.

Matt:

much spam is already illegal (since it's promoting some scam or other)

That's your definition of spam?

Most spam that I see is selling legal products legally. Most I've looked at does not come from out of the country. Or if it does, it's still selling something inside the U.S.

Defining spam perfectly is as tricky as defining "assault" or "child abuse" perfectly. You can always find some way to pick nits about any proposed definition. Similarly, not long ago a shoe company published an editorial defending itself from accusations about its business practices. It paid for the space in several magazines and newspapers. Was that an advertisement subject to legal restrictions, or was it not? The Supreme Court is examining that very question this year. That doesn't mean there's no such thing as an advertisement.

I mean, really, can you nail down a specific legal definition of "telemarketing call?" Sure, but no matter what your definition, something will fall into a gray area.

Personally, I'd suggest that any unsolicited commercial email which is not targeted to a specific individual should be considered spam. Laws should also be written in such a way that the state has little motivation to prosecute unless more than a certain number of emails have been sent--e.g. a $5 fine for each email address you send to that violates the law. Also, if you hire a company to do the spamming for you, you're responsible for what that company does and can be prosecuted with that company.

Start with reasonable definitions like these and the legal process will work itself out over time.

I don't expect spam to be banned. I expect it to be brought under control. It's not a free speech issue, it's a public nuisance issue. There need to be laws about it, just like there are for telemarketers, television commercials, and so on.

It is also an issue of public commons. Networks getting plugged up by unsolicited e-mail will eventually make those networks unusable. Bandwidth is not an "on demand" resource.

And I have to tell you the jurisprudence that puts commercial advertising on the same constitutional level as political speech needs to be revisited and reversed. Advertising is not what the founders had in mind and it's not what needs to be protected in order to guarantee a free society. So the higher principal of the issue is overstated to a fair thee well. Advertising is commerce, not speech and we as a society should regulate the crap out of it if we see fit.

Rick:

Advertising is not what the founders had in mind [when they stipulated the right of free speech] and it's not what needs to be protected in order to guarantee a free society.

Better minds than mine have pulled their chins contemplating that statement.

That said, when you buy a political ad, is that not advertising?

Dean:

You say:

Personally, I'd suggest that any unsolicited commercial email which is not targeted to a specific individual should be considered spam.

OK. That's pretty clear.

But I'm not sure I agree, as it is very easy to send "spam" that is targeted to an individual email address. You can even do mail-merging so it says, "Dear Dean..."

But then you knew that.

So. If the emails are simply unsolicited, is that enough to label it spam...?

Or do we just "do a Justice Powell" and say (about spam) what he said about pornography:

I know it when I see it.

Let's stipulate that we all want to stop spam. That said, it seems to me that the process has to follow these steps:

1. Define spam
   
2. Define penalties for sending spam AND/OR
   
3. Figure out alternate ways to remove economic viability of sending spam

What say ye?

Ara:

We obviously don't "all" want to stop spam, or it wouldn't exist. The spammers themselves have a vested interest in sending it.

Also, you seem to have a pattern of artfully dodging away from opposing opinions you disagree with but don't want to directly debate. When you say . . .

"Better minds than mine have pulled their chins contemplating that statement."

. . . it seems like you're avoiding having to say:

"I disagree with you, but it isn't worth my time to refute you, and I don't want to admit you're right, so I'll take this opportunity to blow an ink cloud before swooshing off to another part of the sea that's less threatening / more worth my time."

Is that about accurate?

For the record, I think your three-step process is a good one.

Spam is currently defined as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE). Antispammers used to use the term Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) but switched to UBE when they realized that 1) some spam wasn't commercial and 2) the problem was not its commercial nature but that it was sent in bulk to millions of people.

Each of the words in "Unsolicited Bulk Email" has a specific and easily-understood meaning, and the term as a whole covers most annoying spam without excluding too much mail you might want to receive. Any legislation should, IMHO, be founded on this definition of spam.

The best way to control 'spam' is with your rightmost finger, assuming you use one of the old IBM-AT clickalong keyboards that I favor. The "Del" key is at bottom far right, next to the oblong "+" key.

I use it copiously and frequently. That way I don't have to whine to the Wisconsin state legislature or the local liberal congresslady about protecting my privacy.

(The kind of people I like electing to public office are those whom I think will do nothing at all about anything at all, besides collecting their paychecks and perdiem. They cost me less money and liberty that way.)

Right now we have too many people trying to tell you whom can telephone and for what purpose, whom you can email and for what purpose, and on and on.

You want real privacy? Just wait a few decades. Your corpse will repose in a box six feet down, if there's enough room left at your suburban cemetery. Either way, you will have nothing but privacy.

Meantime, read whatever part of your email trips your trigger; drink a cool one or two; take your main squeeze to a good movie; feed your cat. Have some fun. And stop whining.

Reform stinks just as badly now as it did when Volstead brought us a liquor free America, along with good old Al Capone and his boys to prove that you shouldn't pay too much attention to what the reformers say on Sunday mornings.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Jonathan:

You crack me up!

Jerry:

You say:

Spam is currently defined as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).

Is that part of a statute somewhere? Where?

And if so, what does "bulk" mean? Is it defined in the statute as "many, many identical emails sent to different recipients?"

How many is many...?

Please -- I'm not mocking you -- I sincerely want to know. Remember, I'm trying to nail down step #1 of my three-step solution to eradicating spam (see above).

Jonathan:

You crack me up!

Jerry:

You say:

Spam is currently defined as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).

Is that part of a statute somewhere? Where?

And if so, what does "bulk" mean? Is it defined in the statute as "many, many identical emails sent to different recipients?"

How many is many...?

Please -- I'm not mocking you -- I sincerely want to know. Remember, I'm trying to nail down step #1 of my three-step solution to eradicating spam (see above).

The New York State Attorney General is going after the more odious spammers with current fraud and deceptive practices laws with some success.

You know, the one's that don't include real return address or contact info, or are some awful get-rich-quick scheme.

But those wacky Nigerian bank account scams (please help me rescue $25 million!) will be harder to nail down, as they are almost all from overseas.

I normally agree with Arnold's attitude that govt. is best that does least, but I've been a network admin at an ISP, and have seen servers brought to their knees and bandwidth been sucked up spam to the point that surfing becomes very poor for customers.

I'd rather a technological fix, but this is inherently a social problem at it's root. For in-depth debates on the merits and drawbacks of current technical attempts to fight it, see the archives of the Politech list at politechbot.com

Jerry's got it right.

Again, this "nail down a definition" stuff strikes me as a distraction from the issue. You cannot define rape in a way that satisfies everybody. You cannot define assault in a way that satisfies everybody, and you cannot define child abuse in a way that satisfies everybody, or stalking in a way that satisfies everybody.

Jerry is, I believe, correct in that those most seriously involved in anti-Spam legislation have generally settled on Unsolicited Bulk Email, which seems like a perfectly good phrase (although if he had a link that would be nice). Combine that with laws which make it not worth the government's time to go after someone who sends out a few dozen letters, and that makes it possible to prosecute you if you hire someone outside the U.S. to do your spamming for you, and you're on your way to a general solution.

I must also agree with the consensus against Arnold Harris' position. I'm on a 28.8 connection, and downloading excessive spam costs me involuntary time, and spammers give me no way at all to say "GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME ALONE." This is not acceptable, any more than it would be acceptable for telemarketers to leave 40-50 messages a day on my answering machine, or to call me at 2 a.m. to try to sell me stuff.

This isn't a free speech issue, it's a nuisance issue. I'd have no problem with unsolicited bulk email if I had ways to down the flow. Indeed, one piece of spam once saved me $25,000.00, and that's no lie. (Long story short: he helped me with my tax problems, perfectly legally.)

There will always be spam. We should not make it illegal. What we need are practices to get it under control.

Dean:

So far, what we seem to have decided here is that the primary problem with junk mail is that it chokes available bandwidth, and that is costing the ISPs a lot of money.

I don't buy the part about it costing a lot of money in lost productivity on the job or at home. Like Arnold says, how much trouble is it to hit the delete key anyway? Dunno about you but I can delete 100 pieces of junk mail in less than 30 seconds.

And no, junk mail is not a "social problem" even when it shows up in my email box urging me to "get a bigger weiner by dinnertime."

On that last point, I think all UBE should be required by law to be labeled as such in the Subject line. Or else.

Any decent filtering program can then toss it in the trash before you have a chance to be embarrassed.

(NOTE: after reading Dean's mind-boggling tale of a $25 thousand savings from ONE lousy piece of junk mail, I'm not so sure I want to toss all of it in the trash ...but that's just me).

So...all that's left is to address the problem of the ISPs being inundated by bandwidth-hogging junk mail. I think that can be solved by setting up a centralized "Do not mail" list; emailers that violate that order will be subject to prosecution.

Now, clearly, off-shore spammers will prosper as never before, but what is the alternative? I suppose we could send Mossad after them. Hey, I like that idea!

Ara, as a holder of an email account with little to no spam reduction (Hotmail), I can tell you that in some cases, spam can be more than an annoyance in terms of time. I have to log in and delete spam every day, or it will fill up my space allotment, and the account will be closed. Sometimes I can get away with every other day, but that is a rarity.
That email account receives (by my rough estimate) 90% unsolicited and useless messages.

Caveat: By using the email account on a continuous basis for over 5 years, and putting it on several websites, it has attracted many spam messages. I only use my personal email in limited cases.
[To compare to a phone number: Do you have to restrict use of your publicly-listed phone number because of telemarketing calls? Do you get so many phone messages on your answering machine that you have to erase the whole tape every day? That is my situation with the Hotmail account.]

Ara: While I don't have links (Dean or Jerry may) I have encountered enough discussion, citations of fact, and reports from businesses to know that spam is a major problem for businesses.

It's one thing to say "I can delete 100 pieces of junk mail in 30 seconds"; it's another to deal with even a small company (say 200-300 employees) who get (say) 50-100 spams a day per employee, and that can be termed conservative. Even 200 employees that get 50 spams/day each generates 10,000 spams! Extrapolate and you can see the problem.

Arnold: while you are more than capable of hitting the delete key, this misses the point, which is: all that spam has to be delivered first. If you check out some of the articles of the major spammers, you'll see where they send tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of a particular spam. That's how spam makes money; you need to expand to that scale to make the likely 0.03% who do respond profitable. Go check out some of the research, or records of some of the major spam artists.

And right now we're talking about one post by one spammer. Extrapolate that to even just the major spammers multiplied by the different posts they put up each week. While estimates that 30% of internet mail is now spam may be extreme, that shows the level of severity.

From another angle: suppose some selfish, ignorant, self-centered little rat bastard puts a $2,000 stereo system in his car that pumps out more watts than Hoover Dam on a rainy day. Sure, you can turn up your stereo to drown that out; it's easy. But does that make it just? Or to more judicially accurate, is it equitable? No. Mr. "boom box" doesn't have the right to pollute public air any more than spammers have a right to burn up bandwidth.

Oh, Ara: as for definitions, a fair number of laws already on the books define spam as unsolicited bulk email, with "bulk" frequently defined as 10,000 or more copies. How hard was that? And, yes, that's defined as the same message. And penalties already exist, for the laws I mentioned above. These generally are either a spedific fine, and/or a fine per spam sent. Some laws include jail time. If you want more specifics, try Google.

As I pointed out on your blog, one of the major (and generally uncited) obstacles to effective spam supression is the group of phyical bulk mail solicitors. They oppose any effective laws about spam since those same laws may affect them as well.

good work