On 1/17/2011 11:46 PM, Jeff Chan wrote:
So a couple points: 1. Subscribing to lists opens up lots of grey areas including the above. 2. Some of the areas are very difficult to resolve into spam or ham. Some more aggressive anti-spammers may say all of the above is spam, but others may disagree, and the mail may be legal. Before anyone accuses me of being in favor of spammers, please be aware that I am personally highly against any of these unethical practices, but when essentially making decisions for others, one needs to be very careful and consider whether there may be legitimate, ethical, legal or even wanted uses of such things. One person's ham may be another persons spam, and vice versa. However, most people don't want the stuff bots send. The issue is complex, and there are many deliverability, security and anti-spam companies and organizations that struggle with these issues every day. Maintaining accurate ham and spam corpora and making policies for what belongs in which category is trivial in some easy cases like bot pill spam, but non-trivial in other cases. Cheers, Jeff C.
I appreciate the nuanced feedback but I have thought of similar considerations. I believe the following will help to avoid ambiguity and legal issues.
* Yes, we cannot be 100% sure our opt-in was only for that particular site and not their "partners". But in any case automatic ham trapped mail will be only the mail branded by the subscribed provider, because that is the only mail we know for sure was opted-in. Anything else is kept separate for later analysis.
* If clearly spammy other mail arrives at a particular address, the original subscription can be unsubscribed and the continued flow monitored. That address could then be discarded.
Warren
