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[email at mattruby.com]

No, spams are not welcome to nearly anyone on the Internet, and are in
fact illegal in the US because they are so hated. Just because you,
Andy, are a spammer who likes getting it yourself doesn't mean that
spamming *everyone* is OK.

This spam was directed not to the asterisk-biz list, but to individual
people whose email addresses have appeared on the list. It's OK to send
the *unsolicited*, *commercial* message to the -biz list: that's what
the list is for, and subscribers have *asked* for those messages. All
that's necessary is that the message's subject be asterisk business
(this message would qualify, *if* it were sent only to the list itself,
not its members individually). List members don't necessarily want to
see every message sent to it. Many of us get the list in "digest" form,
which compiles sometimes dozens of distracting messages throughout the
day into one distracting message. Which comes packaged as
"asterisk-biz", so we can filter it, either manually by looking at its
subject and sender, or with our email program's automatic filters.

This spam did not use the accepted way we expect to get commercial
messages from the list. Instead it *exploited the list* by harvesting
email addresses from it, then *directly sending messages* to those
addresses. That technique avoids the system of expectations and
protections we use that make an *exception* for the -biz list, and
instead is just spam. Targeted spam, so we're more likely to read it,
even if we're not interested. That's dishonest - and, in the US,
probably criminal.

Andy, you want these kinds of messages, you can get them *when they're
sent to the list*. You can Google for them. There are marketing
companies who would love to have your name on their list, which often
work with conventions (like VON, etc) to sign you up to all kinds of
vendors, specific to all kinds of interests you might tell them. But
just because you've got a tolerance (and perhaps a fetish) for spam
doesn't mean the rest of us find it acceptable. *We don't.*

Something like 95% of all email is now spam, which means it's not just
annoying, but it also means that even if we use automatic spam
protection, we're all paying higher costs just to transport all that
worthless email, that will never be read, around the Internet that we're
all paying for.

Andy, you started using this list by spamming it with messages for
products *not related* to the Asterisk, the *only* subject of
unsolicited commercial messages that is allowed on this list. You got
beat up over it, more than once, but you learned better and now behave
like a responsible member. Before, your messages *made your market hate
you*, which means that all those messages were a waste (and worse),
because their commercial effect was bad. This new spam is even worse. It
destroys the initial trust required to start commerce just by appearing
in inboxes the way it does. It's got the commercial value of the drug
and sex spams that come in through the day - right down to its style,
mostly an image of text, used to bypass spam filters. That's cheating,
and only fools do business with cheaters. I'm disappointed to see that
you don't understand the basic point about spam. And that you're not
wise enough to understand that just because you want something bad, that
doesn't mean the rest of the community will want it, so it's not OK to
send it.

Spam sucks. Don't make your business equal "sucks". Basic business
principles, unless you're selling sex or drug crap to suckers.


On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 03:39 -0500, asterisk-biz-request@lists.digium.com
wrote: