Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

[Gunnar Lindberg <]

Piet, I think I hear you saying that all mail must carry a label and
that all mail without it should be discarded; non-spam is labeled as:

    X-UCE: No

I do hope I'm wrong.

Then I'm 100% convinced that spammers will add exactly that, if so
required - hell, if they invent or steal From-addresses they'll be
prepared to do anything to get their junk out to everyone.

So, we need legal support against those who forge or lie in email.
This is nothing new; does the EU Directive help us with that? Or do
we in fact have all that support already, just we don't use it?

	Gunnar

>From owner-anti-spam-wg@localhost  Thu Jan 21 10:55:48 1999
>Message-Id: <UTC199901210955.KAA00852.piet@localhost>
>To: Dave Wilson davew@localhost
>Subject: Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce 
>Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 10:55:07 +0100
>From: Piet Beertema <Piet.Beertema@localhost

>    Labelling carries with it an implicit narrowing of the audience.
>Correct. But in commercial circles that's better
>known as "targeting"; and considered useful.

>    I can't see spammers swallowing this voluntarily; their forged
>    return addresses suggest that professional "we-spam-4-u" crowd
>    don't even care about keeping their address lists up to date.
>That category of spammers will never add an X-UCE
>header line either.

>    However, I may be wrong, and I'll concede that there's no harm
>    in making room in the specs for a ***strictly voluntary***
>    categorisation system.
>Fine with me, as long as the absence of a category
>by default leads to discarding the message.
>    
>    The primary problem is that global tastes are way too diverse
>    for a global system. What causes outcries in the U.S. doesn't
>    bat eyelids in Japan, and vice versa => no middle ground.
>We're not talking about taste, but about categories.
>And categories like "cars" and "XXX" are understood
>very well all over the world.

>    What global body would administer the categories?
>Microsoft. :-)

>    I'm making the assumption that our primary problem is threat
>    to our network infrastructure; a simple yes/no at the ISP's
>    MTA is **probably** just about close enough to the source to
>    fix this
>You're making a false assumption. The irritation that
>spam causes amongst users is infinitely larger than
>the threat to our network infrastructure. Besides,
>that threat doesn't even come primarily from spam,
>but more so from the massive complaints about it.

>    If one really wishes to receive updates on a particular subject,
>    there are many, many better directories and opt-in lists that
>    are much more reliable, with a much finer granularity, than any
>    massmail categorisation system.
>True. But before you can subscribe to those, you
>must first have learned about a product. And even
>UCE can help in that.


>	Piet