At 03:34 PM 8/17/2002 -0600, Vernon Schryver wrote: > > >I figure any mail message with more than 10 recipients is "bulk." > > > > yes, but a lot of the spam I receive is directed to only one person - > >A message that is substantially different from all other messages is >not "spam" as I and many others see it. It can be illegal (e.g. a We need to be careful that we do not confuse some properties of transport with the properties of recipient impact. Whether a copy of a message is sent with related copies -- as happens with the data compression technique that uses a single copy of the body and a list of recipient addresses -- or whether the related copies are sent individually, the effect on the recipient is the same. Whether the body is identical or whether it conforms to a template is, again, a minor technical point that is totally irrelevant to the salient denial of service effect that motivates objections to spam. An ISP might care about this difference in packaging. A recipient does not. d/ ps. The use of the term "substantially different" might be a fulcrum for debate, but let me suggest we avoid it. Rather than dealing with the major issues we would end up debating minor semantics. ---------- Dave Crocker <mailto:dave@tribalwise.com> TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com> tel +1.408.246.8253; fax +1.408.850.1850