Bonno,
Unfortunately 'knowing' is rarely the result of first hand experience
in this case, at least without a good deal of focus and research over
time. Personally, I have found that E-mail coming from the the better
bulk-mail providers rarely breaks my rules. Generally if you have
heard of the company represented in the E-mail and it comes from a
first rate bulk-mail provider, they do in fact not violate the rules
very often if at all. Some companies also perform their own
bulk-mailing such as Amazon, and they should be especially aware of the
potential of being blacklisted. There are others of course that don't
really care, and the primary violation is typically some form of
harvesting where they purchase addresses or re-use them from other
resources. It's rare that a company that you have heard of not
honoring opt-outs, though sometimes due to multiple internal working
groups and not having a central repository for managing such
subscriptions, a company might unsubscribe you to one list only to
introduce another one that you are default-opted-into.
I guess what I was really after was what people like yourself do when
you find that an ad for Amazon, J.Crew, Office Max, or even Orbitz is
blocked by your system. Do you block them purposefully? Do you just
go with the flow figuring that if they are blacklisted there is a
reason? Do you research the sender and take corrective action? Or do
you just simply wait for users to complain about something being
blocked? And regardless of the action that you take, what are your
'rules', or are there any specific rules that you or others use?
Thanks,
Matt
Bonno Bloksma wrote:
Matt,
Although I agree with your
reasoning, my problem would then be.... how do I determine who belongs
to what catagorie? Overhere I see stuff getting caught which is
definitely a newsletter of some sorts but I don't know whether the user
requested it or not. Nor whether the user might want it or not.
As we have a lot of students with a
very divers interest area it's impossible to know what is normal. Also
being the mail admin is only a (small) part-time job overhere, as long
as it's running..... ;-)
I keep telling my students "don't
unsubscribe as it will only increase your spam". Now maybe *I* can make
a exeption by reading a list of companies that honor opt-out but I know
most of our students and staff would not. They'd either unsubscribe or
not, without reading such a list, "it's too much work". ;-(
Groetjes,
Bonno Bloksma
-----
Original Message -----
Sent:
Monday, December 20, 2004 2:01 PM
Subject:
[Declude.JunkMail] OT: How to define "spam" and "ham"
This was the subject of a recent off-list discussion between myself and
Pete where there was a perception that my definition of spam was too
conservative or rather my definition of ham was too liberal. While I
readily admit that in practice, I do personally wish to block
many fewer things that I consider to be legitimate first-party
advertising than most do, I don't necessarily get the impression that
the definitions that I use are all that much off the mark. I have also
found that the folks at BondedSender think that I am some sort of
anti-advertising zealot for reporting what is near universally what we
would consider to be spam, so it does go both ways :) So I wanted to
throw this topic out for some feedback and other presentations of one's
own definitions and maybe learn something in the process.
First off, I naturally follow the basic definition of spam that is
widely promoted where spam is both unsolicited and bulk. What
causes such wide derivation from this common definition however is the
sub-definition of what constitutes unsolicited, and the gray area that
exists beyond this definition due to abuse.
The definition that I use to qualify advertising or newsletter related
ham is as follows:
This definition starts with me treating things as ham
if it comes from a first-party relationship with the sender, however
there are some exceptions as follows:
[.....]
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