On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 12:59, Warren Togami Jr. <wtog...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
+1 to those. tagged addressing makes this easy to implement (and track). I use this approach on a very small scale for a small number of ham newsletters in my own corpus... --j.
