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<HEAD><TITLE>Unsolicited versus commercial email</TITLE></HEAD>

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<H1>Unsolicited versus commercial email</H1>

This is why our terminology about this excludes the word "commercial"
 -- we're talking about unsolicited mail, period.  This means if someone sends
a client of ours a pile of unsolicited MMF's, a pile of invites to check out
a non-commercial web site, GIFs of a missing child, or Ghawd knows what, it
still falls in the same category.<P>

Some people have found this wording to be somewhat objectionable, but
our clients appreciate it.  People have said things like, "What if I send
you a response to a USENET article, that you didn't ask for? Is that
unsolicited?" Our answer is no, we're not talking about mailing a topical
response to a public post, we're talking about gathering someone's e-mail
address and tossing it on a list which people use to mail out stuff
totally unrelated to, say, someone's post.  Or if someone visits your web
site, and looks at it, and clicks on your mailto: link, and sends you mail
that says "Nice web site!", well, fine -- but if they make a note of that
e-mail address and later use it to mail you something totally unrelated
that you never asked for... that's mail you never solicited. This means if
someone looks at my web page and says, "Hey, she used to live in Peru,
I'll just add her to my mailing list for talking about tourism in Peru!"
that's uncool -- though they could certainly drop me a note and say, "Hey,
I just found your web page when I did a search for Peru, and I noticed you
used to live there, and I have a web page I've put up with links to pages
of people who used to live in Peru, would you like to be on it?" <P>

FWIW, an example would be the time that I subscribed to a mailing list
about Peru, and that was cool, but then for some strange reason, I started
getting piles of mail from some other address in the same domain as the
list to which I had subscribed, and the messages were all Word 6.0
documents which I couldn't read, and looking into it, I found out that
everyone on the first list had just been added to another all of a
sudden... this is attributable to general cluelessness, and it was well-
intentioned, and a bit of talk about this cleared things up, but IMHO it's
important for people to generally be aware that the existence of an e-mail
address doesn't mean it can be used without someone's consent, and I'd
hope to see consciousness raised in that respect.<P>

While the bulk of unsolicited e-mail does tend to be commercial, there are
some instances that aren't strictly commercial, and I feel it's of some
VALUE to argue this point in a manner that doesn't have so much to do with
what's in the message as it as to do with how it ended up in one's inbox.
This means if someone gets subscribed to a mailing list without their
consent, they haven't solicited the e-mail they received as a result, for
instance...<P>

Well, anyway, that's my soapbox moment about the term "UCE"... I feel fine
about "Excessive Multi-Posting" for instance, but I'm not overfond of the
term "Unsolicited Commercial E-mail."<P>

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<ADDRESS><HR>Abby Franquemont-Guillory</ADDRESS>

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