On Fri, 19 Jan 2007, Guy Fraser wrote:
> > Josh, under the law, that's not spam. Individually written emails are
> > never spam even if they may be "unsolicited sales material." So, rest
> > assured.
> >
> > Richard
> >
> You are oh so wrong in so many ways.
>
> SPAM is a term used for unsolicited email of any kind be it UCE
> {unsolicited commercial email}, UBE {unsolicited bulk email} or
> anything else that is unsolicited and sent to a large number of
> individuals or cross posted to a number of mailing lists and or
> news groups.
Guy,
No, by law, I'm correct, though it appears you've misread my post.
There's evidence you've misread what I wrote when you say, "sent to a
large number of individuals". When you sit down and author a letter to
_someone,_ "an individual", it's not spam. Note I didn't say "a large
number of individuals," I said "individually written," meaning, to one
person. ...I thought my writing was plain enough, but I guess English is
flexible enough to always provide room for misunderstanding...
BTW, this is a question of a legal definition of terms, not general use by
a community. Whatever the community thinks is irrelevent; there's law in
the U.S. regarding SPAM. I know not because I'm a lawyer and read the
statutes in question, but because I founded a company and as fearless
leader am responsible for knowing the rules; I consulted our corporate
council on the matter for definitive working rules in order to set our
corporate policy (in particular for Sales people as they're the biggest
risk to an organization in this regard).
Either way, I'm sure their embarassment on the matter is a substantial
penalty for the offending party as this community is their target customer
base, so your obvious anger can be at least somewhat satiated.
Richard
--
Richard Troy, Chief Scientist
Science Tools Corporation
510-924-1363 or 202-747-1263
rtroy@ScienceTools.com, http://ScienceTools.com/