Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

[Carl Moberg <]

At 16:35 19/01/99 +0100, you wrote:
>On Mon, 18 Jan 1999, Dave Wilson wrote:
>
>> > 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, it's a
>> non-stop ride to the pits of despair :-) I can just about hack the idea of a
>> label that says "This is unsolicited and may be damaging to your
server", but
>> only because spam is worse (just about). Labelling *content* starts to raise
>> the spectre of censorship.
>> 
>
>Wait a minute... censorship?  The idea was that the *spammers*
>(advertisers) would label their messages so as to enable ISPs to pass them
>through to customers that have indicated they did want to receive UCE 
>marked with those specific keywords. It is no guarantee that the UCE will
>be of the kind the person wants but it is between the person and the
>advertiser - if the person doesn't get UCE of the proper category s/he
>can try using other keywords or tell the ISP to stop forwarding UCE to
>him/her altogether.

 OK, to make this useful as a information service to customers, we would
 probably have to define pretty "deep" structures, like

   swedish:cars:volvo  or
   north-america:resellers:computers:spare-parts:cpu:intel:pentium

 We could of course try to fight _unsolicited_ commercial e-mail and
 actually go for opt-in and mailinglists based on subscriptions instead.

 Trying to filter usefulness from a river of spam would take pretty
 complex content-based definitions and filtering.

-- carl