What to do about wine spam?

Max, I have had a few similar experiences. In many cases, a reputable firm like Acker might end up getting an e-mail address by buying someone else's list. I believe, for instance, that when wine.com sold its assets it also sold off its customers' e-mail addresses (one reason why I always carefully examine the privacy policy of any site that asks me for an addy). In any event, I have dealt with similar cases by doing a whois and firing off an e-mail to the technical contact, saying that I did not give permission for them to send me e-mail and if they do not remove me posthaste I will forward their e-mail as spam to their upstream provider. This approach has worked very well for me, as most reputable firms do not relish problems with their website hosting company.

Mark Lipton

"Mark Lipton" in news: snipped-for-privacy@eudrup.ude...

Yes, I appreciate that email addresses travel. (And I appreciate the comments and advice.) My complaint was what this firm is doing with an address, rather than how it got it. Repeated commercial email not solicited by that address. (With inclusions common to get-rich-quick spam, size-expansion spam, etc.) There are any number of more reputable ways for a firm to handle this situation than by electing to spam. Is not sauce for the goose sauce for the gander?

I still wonder whether anything exists that is pro-active, that will remove the nuisance of chasing these cases down individually. Maybe not.

(disclaimer- I've attended several informal offlines/tastings/dinners with John Kapon, but never really had a conversation with him).

As Mark said, it's no surprise that a firm might end up with a particular email address. Many possibilities.

In the particular case of Acker, even though I'm on numerous wine email lists I never got anything from them until recently, when I did indeed opt in. And since then I get an email from time to time, but not a barrage a la Carolina Wine Company, the all-time leader in emails (probably at least doubling Wine Library, closest competitor). I actually feel sure (Acker is a very reputable firm) that if you click on the opt-out link, you'll be removed.

There are other wine email senders ("vinoman2@something or other" springs to mind) who seem to ignore all requests for removal, and continue to send. In those cases only resort is to either do an email block or send to spam filter.

I understand that your question has to do with how to prevent in future. Best bet is to use a learning spam filter (partially misnamed, see below). It'll take some time to work out and will never be perfect - notifying re vinoman2 leads my filter to think mailers with wine in subject from PremierCru or Rochambeau should be filtered, but as I let them back into main mailbox filter gradually figures out that I want those.

And here's the part that makes everyone scream at me: it's not spam. Unwanted commercial email, sure. But it's obviously targeted. Spam (for email) is the mass mailing (content usually but not neccessarily commercial) to an untargeted audience, with no regard as to whether the recipient has any interest in the product. Advertisements for (looking at my current spam-filter) Vicoden, Viagra, stock tips, "wanna get laid tonight", etc in my box are spam- sender has no clue that I have any interest in those items. Advertisements for wine, probably targeted to my email address, might be unwanted but are probably not technically spam. I got grief from folks here for pointing out that posts selling wine here might well be unwanted commercial content, but are not technically spam (which in Usenet is defined as posts to multiple unrelated newsgroups). I realize that spam is becoming synonymus with commercial email (or posts in Usenet), but I personally prefer to keep to the original definition, for the sake of clarity. Though time may wear me down.

best, Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

Sorry, Dale, but spam is shorthand for "unsolicited commerical e-mail" (UCE). Even Acker sending commerical e-mails to someone who hasn't requested or approved it qualifies as UCE. One might argue that such activity is no different from telemarketing or bulk mailing, but the essential difference is that -- unlike those in those media -- there is no use charge for the Internet, so UCE is widely viewed as a misuse of communal resources. That is the reason it so widely frowned upon: it actually degrades (signficantly) the functionality of the Internet.

Mark Lipton

Mark,

Spam is becoming shorthand for UCE, but my point was that is not what the term actually refers to. Most people in US make "coq au vin" with chicken, but as Ian would point out if its not coq, it's not truly coq au vin. At some point general usage wins out, but I occasionally make a stand (and I won't even read the US Today even when free in a motel after an article years ago said a village was decimated, with no one left).

For info on the origins of the term spam, see

Spam (in the original use of the word) does not have to be commercial ("Jesus is Coming Soon", for instance). Canter and Siegel created fury not because theirs was a commercial post, but because it was posted to thousands of groups. A post to an immigration newsgroup might have been prohibited by that newsgroup's rules, but would not have been Spam. UCE can be Spam, or it can not be (further, Spam can be UCE, nor not). Actually most Spam is UCE, and most UCE is Spam, but the terms are not totally interchangable (or at least weren't).

I'm certainly not a defender of either Spam nor UCE, but have tried to make the distinction. As to stressing the resources of the web, I find Spam to be far more insidious. Every week or two I find an unsolicited (but almost certainly targeted ) email re my particular interests (wine, food, homelessness, non-profit administration, etc). With the exception of vinoman2, those I've clicked for an opt-out have done so. This UCE is scarcely a major stress on me,my ISP, nor the infrastructure of the internet. But even with my spam filter a few true Spams (untargeted) get through, and dozens per day end up in my filter. That's not even counting the fact that AOL (on this account) screens out several million messages a day to their clients.

You know that sporadic hoax about the upcoming Internet Tax? I personally think that a real internet tax is the best solution for Spam. If every ISP was "taxed" based on email sent (say $.01 per thousand addresses sent to) and passed those costs along to the sender, it would dramatically reduce spam. I use email to send a newsletter to several hundred volunteers , probably weekly, but even so that plus all my normal emails, business and personal, from both accounts, would only cost me a dime a month. But the Viagra sales guy who thinks it's worth sending emails (with an automated mailer) to 1,000,000 addresses would suddenly have $10 profits lost off the bat.

As to Acker, I wasn't especially defending them (as I said, I've tasted with John, but have never exchanged more than couple of pleasantries and wine observations, and very seldom shop at AMC). . But I do think that targeted emails with an effective opt-out are not the big evil out there. Max at the very least posts here and on WCWN, his getting wine email is not a shocker. For that matter, who's to say some wine friend of his didn't think "I bet Max would be interested in this!" and sign him up? 99% of the newsletters I've signed up for don't require a confirm.

That's all, I'll stop. I promise that I won't bemoan the use/misuse of the term again, you guys win. But if you say "decimate" to mean "eliminate" I'll scream :)

Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

"Dale Williams" in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m23.aol.com...

Yes indeed Dale, I am with you somewhat there -- though my complaint concerned practices, rather than what they are called. (I myself might have written "originally refers to," above; I follow the common practice -- the IEEE's practice and that of other standards bodies -- of lumping UCE under the convenient word "spam;" and faith and begorra, if anyone is going to take a stand on that, I assume they will first take a stronger stand on more abject examples: using "Web" to mean Internet, against its coiner's definition, of course, as a web of linked documents [1]; or the idiom "hacker," which had nuanced meanings understood by everyone who used it until wrenched from context and distorted by hip misusage by writers of the

1982 US movie _WarGames_ and by Dan Rather and comparably well-informed technical historians.) Like junk mail and junk phone calls (see my rejection of UCE predates this mailer's sending of it to me. At no point has the mailer asked (which at least would have salvaged good will).

Part of the reason I am flexible about the _word_ "spam" is something that may make no sense to those using email only since, say, the late 1990s, and reliant on their own experience, or on WWW post-facto "Internet histories" (seldom written or passed by anyone remembering the events) -- but the issue of UCE is relatively recent. I've been using email longer and steadier than I've used the Usenet (itself an email offshoot turning 25 this year, by the way) and for at least my first 15 years (1980-1995) and I believe longer, UCE was basically unheard-of among anyone I knew. It was exotic enough to command explicit offhand dismissal even as late as RFC1855 [2] (and by the way _this_ RFC1855 mention was actually understood the same way by its authors). Only with the mainstreaming of email and the commercial development of the INTERNET did people do the formerly unthinkable -- buttressed by their ignorance of tradition.

[1] "The WWW world consists of documents, and links. . . . Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data. -- Tim Berners-Lee, Message-ID: , 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT, Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary. [First announcment of "Web" on Usenet and by the way, a professional editor would of course have changed Berners-Lee's "which" to "that" -- the pitfalls of self-publishing .. --MH] [2] "The cost of delivering an e-mail message is, on the average, paid about equally by the sender and the recipient (or their organizations). This is unlike other media such as physical mail, telephone, TV, or radio. Sending someone mail may also cost them in other specific ways like network bandwidth, disk space or CPU usage. This is a fundamental economic reason why unsolicited e-mail advertising is unwelcome (and is forbidden in many contexts)." -- RFC1855 (1995) sec 2.1.1

Yes! Let's keep some respect for the Latin origin of the term. ;-)

You are correct, Dale. My point was that UCE is spam, but the term "spam" goes beyond that meaning, as you rightly point out. In the world of Usenet abuse, there is a clear distinction between UCE and EMP (excessive multiposting). In the case of the latter form of abuse, there's even a nice quantification on Usenet: the Breibart Index (BI). Alas, e-mail is not so easily tracked, so an analogous measure is not easily arrived at.

My spam solution is more technical: scrap SMTP, the protocol by which e-mail is sent. It is antiquated and inherently insecure. Even the enhanced ESMTP protocol does not adequately protect against abuse. My vision is for a new protocol that employs binary headers for reduced bandwidth consumption and strong authentication mechanisms. Unfortunately, such a drastic change would require major lobbying in quarters that a Professor of Chemistry is unlikely to have access to. :(

Mark Lipton