FC: Direct Marketing Association's very narrow view of what spam is

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Robert Wientzen, president of the Direct Marketing Association, was 
interviewed on CBS News Sunday Morning for a segment on spam.

The CBS News correspondent doing the interview said that one view of spam 
is that it is "anything in your inbox that you didn't ask for."

Wientzen disagreed. He said (this is an exact quote from a video 
recording): "Spam is essentially email that misrepresents an offer or 
misrepresents the originator, or in some way attempts to confuse or defraud 
people... The reality is that, in spite of all the trouble that email is 
causing, Americans and people all over the world in fact a lot of people do 
respond to email offers, and they often respond to offers for things they 
didn't even know existed, from people they didn't know existed."

So spam is just fraudulent email, not unsolicited bulk email? News to me.

-Declan




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------