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Excursus on the Meaning of "spam", Anent the Recent Bunfights on the Term in Various Discussions. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-16  

Here is a history of the use of the term “spam" in the context of network abuse.

In The Beginning was Usenet, a collection of "news” groups hosted on a decentralized and cooperative worldwide collection of Network News Transport Protocol servers. As soon as Eternal September began, a new variety of parasite began taking advantage of the rich new ecosystem by dumping advertising messages into vast numbers of groups.

The event most connected with this moment in the evolution of spam was the Green Card advertisement campaign by Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel. There was discussion in the group news.admin.net-abuse.misc in which the consensus emerged that the Monty Python "Spam” piece exemplified the problem: the same thing, over and over and over and over, intrusive, wasteful, disrespectful, &c &c. The “Make Money Fast" fad (electronic chain letters, basically) was one of the forms most often encountered. (Prior to this, my acquaintance with another meaning for spam was “Software Person Attempting Management" in my Engineering section at Ford Motor Company.)

Shortly thereafter, some folks discovered that you could suck down all of the email addresses that had been used in Usenet posts, and send email adverts and other materials directly to users, bypassing the likelihood that your electronic used food would be scrubbed by the cancel brigade of Usenet administrators.

The first major player was a felon, Willie Newell, who sent mail as “Fred Sterling" advertising the Zygon Learning Machine. The torch-bearing mob of email system admins was able to get his hosting by a Seattle ISP canceled. Willie eventually did time, but not for his net.shenanigans. Then came the Trumpistical Sanford Wallace, about whom nuf ced.

In the email sphere, the definition of spam centered on the word “unsolicited", as well as the concept of massive distribution. The term UBE became common, usually meaning “Unsolicited Bulk Email", along with UCE, where the distinguishing mark was Commercial.

At the time, I was head of the Policy Enforcement group at a dialup provider in Dallas; on more than one occasion, when terminating a customer for UBE, the rejoinder would be "BULK‽ I only sent ten thousand! ‘Bulk’ is half a million or more!” Consequently, we refined our UBE to refer to unsolicited broadcast email — substantially identical content sent to at least two destinations who had not given the sender explicit permission for broadcast email to be sent.

The focus on “unsolicited” pushed aside any consideration of “censorship": It’s not Content, it’s Consent that is the issue. When Harris Polls sued my employer at the time, Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), which published one of the first effective block lists combating email spam, this was one of the major determinants that caused the plaintiff’s accusations to fall over.

In the email sphere, much has evolved and transmogrified since those simple early days.

In the DK context, I see much that is called "spam” which doesn’t quite fit either of the evolved definitions from other realms, which can derail discussions.

As happened in ancient times, perhaps a consensus on the terminology can be arrived at here.



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