Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce
- Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 10:48:55 +0100
(i) as we're looking at legal measures, we only get one shot at this,
so we need to think good + long-term
Yes!
(ii) Spam is such a problem that it's fair to say that recoding and
reinstalling MTA's will happen lightning quick, at least among
those who care.
And among those who don't care it's not a problem:
the mere presence of an X-UCE header line gives the
users the opportunity to do filtering themselves.
We're looking at a way to force spammers to limit their distribution.
This won't happen voluntarily. A legally-defined "grace period" where
spammers may use X-headers while they get their MTAs recoded has a
certain appeal
It sure has: see above. But it's not "may use", but
"must use": recoding of MTA's is not a prerequisite.
I, for one, won't be recoding my primary MTA to allow legal spam.
You won't have to, as long as you pass on the X-UCE
header line [unchanged]. But you'd better do that
with X- header lines anyway. ;-)
Another thought: since we're tagging anyway, do we want "categories"
of SPAM? Like Financial (MMF spammers should set this), Technical,
Erotic, Illegal (MMF spammers should set this too :), etc...?
Labelling anything at all is a terrible idea in the first place
Providing hooks is never a bad idea.
Labelling *content* starts to raise the spectre of censorship.
No way: categorising content is nothing new and has
nothing to do with censorship: in fact the Subject
line is a form of 'categorising'...
Piet
