Re: But Facebook are not spammers - here's a screenshot

[David M Chess <chess () us ibm com>]

Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu:

> On Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:34:55 EDT, David M Chess said:

> > If I manually send a note to everyone in my address book, saying "sign 
up 
> > for service X 'cause I like it!", am I spamming?  I think so.
>
> If I manually send a note to everybody in my address book, saying "Party 
on
> Saturday!" or "My new e-mail address is...", am I spamming?

In the "Party on Saturday!" case you are spamming unless you have good 
reason to think that everyone in your address book has a reasonable chance 
of caring.  If, for instance, 90% of the people in your address book live 
too far away to attend, it seems pretty spammy.

On the other hand, "My new e-mail address is..." is probably of interest 
to pretty much everyone in your address book, assuming your address book 
consists of people that you've exchanged email with.

And yes these are definitely very subjective judgements; see below.  :)

> > Now if I only have five people in my addressbook, and I send them all 
> > email saying "wow you'll love this band" because I think that all five 
of 
> > them really will love it, is *that* spamming?  That's so de minimus and 

> > borderline that I'd say "probably not".
>
> So at what value of five does it become spam?

There is no such value.  It's roughly like asking at what value of N does 
a pile of N sand-grains go from being small to being large.  But the 
"five" isn't really the important part of that paragraph, I don't think. 
For whatever value of N, if I really think that every one of the N people 
in my address book, considered individually, will like the band and 
appreciate getting email from me about it, I wouldn't consider it spam. As 
N increases, it becomes less likely that I can reasonable claim to think 
that.  And yeah, it's quite subjective.

For me at least, whether something is in fact spam has an inescapable 
subjective component.  It lives, I think, in the "unsolicited" part of 
UBE. 

By "unsolicited" we don't really mean "any mail that is not in response to 
an explicit request for a reply"; we really mean something more like "any 
mail that is not part of an ongoing conversation", or something like that. 
 

Telling someone that has emailed me in the past that my email address has 
changed is arguably solicited in that sense.

Telling someone who lives nearby that there's a party on Saturday is 
arguably solicited in that sense.

Telling someone who lives on a different continent about it, probably not 
so much.

Because I think that whether something is spam and/or UBE has a subjective 
component, I think that automated spam detectors are inevitably heuristic, 
and imperfect.  But we live with that in the anti-virus world, where we 
have mathematical proofs that detectors must be imperfect.  We just have 
to deal with the same situation with respect to UBE...

DC

_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.