Spam blocking with law

Spam blocking with law

Posted Jun 30, 2003 13:40 UTC (Mon) by mwilck (guest, #1966)
In reply to: Spam blocking with law by giraffedata
Parent article: Spam blocking with greylisting

I don't want legislators handling the tricky definition of unsolicited commercial mail

What is so tricky about that? "Unsolicited" is absolutely clear - everything the recipient didn't ask for. "Commercial" shouldn't be so hard to define either.

The right solution would be to use the free market.

The solution you propose has nothing to do with the free market. It is just an different form of legislation. This can be very compared well to environmental legislation (instead of forbidding to dump waste, we assign a cost to it). This may or may not work better than a simple ban. In any case, the assigned cost is determined by legislation, not by the market.

"Proper targeting" requires you to have detailed knowledge about the recipient's interests (in your words, to know what sort of unsolicited commercial email the recipient would not consider "unwanted"). If that knowledge comes from person himself signing up to your newsletter - fine, it's not unsolicited, it's not spam. Otherwise, you could hardly have gathered that knowledge by legal means, at least not in Europe, because such information is considered private and confidential - you cannot have it unless the person himself has given it to you.

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