On Thu, 15 May 2003, Randy Bush wrote: > what is wrong with this picture? > this exemplifies the corporate and legislative attempt to confuse > spam == uce with forgery. if they can make the latter the issue, > this leaves the way completely clear for unsolicited commercial > email from the corporate sector which now fills our post boxes with > ground trees. Well, the issues are perhaps a little more complex than you're portraying them. J.I. and I spent the better part of two years working on the California law, which has a similar provision.
From a customer's point of view, spam is anything they didn't want to receive.
From an ISP's point of view, spam is anything that was sent or received without having been paid for.
From a politician's point of view, spam is non-political UCE.
These are almost wholly incompatible views. One thing that everybody can get together on is that if someone sends spam (for _any_ of those values of "spam") using a forged source address, that's bad. Thus, it's easy to get a provision through which puts heavy penalties on source-address forgery, even if nobody can agree on what spam itself is. -Bill