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

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents-montreal org>]

> And the main issue you have a problem with is bulk, right?

Not really; that's just the point we disagree on.  Solicited bulk I
have no issues with.

> Please help me here with how an action taken by an individual user
> typing in emails is bulk?

I don't believe that's all that's going on here.  Unless Facebook
attracts people using MUAs with a "send to my entire address book and
everything you can find in my mailbox" button and too little sense to
realize when it's inappropriate to use it.

> > > Gmail does it.  Yahoo does it.  CNN does it.
> > I find it interesting that two of the three organizations you cite
> > as justification for your position are ones I've had to block in
> > toto because of blatant, egregious, and repeated abuse issues.
> > Citing them in support of your argument is pretty close to an own
> > goal, in my opinion.
> They are not a justification, they are an illustrative example, see
> above.

Still seems like an own goal.  They are very illustrative indeed - of
how abusive a mailer can be.

> And here is the point, was the abuse done by them, or by their users?

By them.  In the case of Yahoo, the final straw for me was once when I
report4ed a spam drop-box webpage they were hosting; they replied with
a "this mail wasn't sent through us" boilerplate, which of course was
true but irrelevant.  I wrote back pointing this out and get the same
response.  I cut everything - spam, previous correspondence, and all,
and wrote a little two-line mail asking something like "is there anyone
human alive ther?" and got THE SAME BLOODY BOILERPLATE BACK.

> Removing of course the fact that Gmail hides IP addresses.

Why removing that?  That's the first strike against gmail: they make it
impossible to, for example, refuse all webmail from
INTELSAT-CUST-VIENNA-TECHNOLOGIES-NG (to name just one of the eight or
so netblocks that I do not want any webmail from, ever) without
refusing all gmail webmail.  For a long time that's all I did - but
then Google (through the Google Groups brand, but I see little point in
drawing a distinction between one of Google's faces and another)
started spamming me.  I've got the full story up at
ftp.rodents-montreal.org:/mouse/misc/google-block.txt.

> Hey, it's not Facebook's fault nobody likes you enough to invite you. :P

Heh.  There's a Facebook group "campaign to get der Mouse on Facebook"
or some such.

I get their stuff through mailing lists and occasionally to alternative
addresses such as my netbsd.org one.  I don't know why I don't get
their spam direct; maybe back when I was still bothering to complain
about spam I sent them a complaint and they added me to their
remove-list?  I don't find their "please sign up" line in any of my
saved "spam and spam complaints" mail, which makes that unlikely (I
generally save complained-about spam, and the complaints, there), but I
also can't account for it any other way - I looked for any reason to
think my private blocking mechanisms were responsible and found none.

/~\ The ASCII                             Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML                mouse () rodents-montreal org
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
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