ES - Party Saturday Night

Matthew G. Saroff (Reply to the pobox address) saroff at vs.lmco.com
Mon Dec 22 06:57:03 PST 1997


On Dec 22,  9:46am, Jan Nowlan wrote:
> Subject: Re: ES - Party Saturday Night
> Please, forgive my ignorance.......What is "Spamming?"
>
> The unenlightened one...
Hi,
	Spamming* is currently defined as the process of either:
*	Posting repeated inappropriate advertisements to a usenet news group
(so selling Amway on rec.org.sca would be spam, but doing on
alt.multi.level.marketing would not be as it was appropriate to the group).
*	Sending out mass (literally millions) of unsolicited commercial email
messages to people.

	Why is spam bad?
1) The recipient, and not the sender, is paying the bulk of the cost of
receiving the mail, either directly, or through higher rates for their ISP for
bandwidth and storage.
2) The volume is so high that it drowns out real communications.  In a number
of usenet groups, this had either destroyed the group, or forced a move to
moderation, which delays message propagation for days, and made someone do a
LOT of work to filter the stuff.  There are groups where a normal volume of 200
or so posting a day have exploded into the thousands from people repeatedly
posting to the group.

	Spam is analogous to walking into a cocktail party, taking out a
megaphone, and reading an advertizement for an hour.

*Spam derives it's name from the Monty Python "Spam" sketch, in which Vikings
singing the word "Spam" repeatedly drown out the dialogue.

-- 
--
Matthew Saroff
Do not reply directly to this message.  Reply to
msaroff at pobox.com
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