Re: But Facebook are not spammers [was: And Facebook sells user data, too ...]

[Gadi Evron <ge () linuxbox org>]

On 5/23/10 4:53 PM, der Mouse wrote:
> > If a person opens their email client -- and you do in fact know them
> > or would not otherwise object to get an email from them -- and they
> > email you, then it is not spam.  It may be unsolicited, but it is not
> > spam.  Agreed?
>
> Not necessarily.  If said person mails me as part of a bulk mailing, it
> may indeed be spam.  (It's relatively unlikely anyone I actually know
> would do that, but that's not really relevant.)
>
> > > There's sure no question of it being email or unsolicited, leaving
> > > only the "bulk" leg of the UBE tripod in question.
> > It is mail, and it is unsolicited, but it is not bulk.
>
> I'm having trouble seeing how it's not.  Substantively identical
> messages, sent in relatively large quantity, to people as unrelated as
> me and Paul Vixie?  Indeed, in a number of cases, apparently sent to
> entire scraped address books?  (For example, most of the ones I've seen
> sent to mailing lists.)

I already answered this very point in my previous email, namely I 
discussed how the messaged differ from each other both in the action of 
sending being individual, and the messages similarity being analagous to 
any web mail service with a signature line option.

> Also notable (in that it vitiates your casting of them as just a
> somewhat unusual webmailer) is that I can't think of a case in which I
> had any clue who the nominally provoking person - the name Facebook
> sticks in the From: - was.  Of the three examples I find in my incoming
> mail that hasn't yet rolled off the end of my historical records, two
> were sent to mailing lists I'm on and the third was sent to my NetBSD
> address; in none of these cases do I recognize the name in the From:.

That is abuse by the users of the service, not the service itself.

Try it, see for yourself.

        Gadi.
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