Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

[Piet Beertema <]

    (i)  as we're looking at legal measures, we only get one shot at this,
	 so we need to think good + long-term
Yes!
    
    (ii) Spam is such a problem that it's fair to say that recoding and
         reinstalling MTA's will happen lightning quick, at least among
	 those who care.
And among those who don't care it's not a problem:
the mere presence of an X-UCE header line gives the
users the opportunity to do filtering themselves.

    We're looking at a way to force spammers to limit their distribution.
    This won't happen voluntarily. A legally-defined "grace period" where
    spammers may use X-headers while they get their MTAs recoded has a
    certain appeal
It sure has: see above. But it's not "may use", but
"must use": recoding of MTA's is not a prerequisite.

    I, for one, won't be recoding my primary MTA to allow legal spam.
You won't have to, as long as you pass on the X-UCE
header line [unchanged]. But you'd better do that
with X- header lines anyway. ;-)

    	Another thought: since we're tagging anyway, do we want "categories"
	of SPAM? Like Financial (MMF spammers should set this), Technical,
	Erotic, Illegal (MMF spammers should set this too :), etc...?
    Labelling anything at all is a terrible idea in the first place
Providing hooks is never a bad idea.

    Labelling *content* starts to raise the spectre of censorship.
No way: categorising content is nothing new and has
nothing to do with censorship: in fact the Subject
line is a form of 'categorising'...


	Piet