;
Email is a tremendously powerful communications tool, used by
millions of people in thousands of positive ways. Unfortunately,
such a powerful tool has the potential to be used in other, less
productive, ways.
Someone sending email incurs no incremental cost; sending one message
costs about the same as sending 100 messages. Some folks use this
feature of email to send messages to thousands, even millions, of
people at once. These are usually advertisements, sometimes sermons
on the sender's favorite topic, sometimes pleas for financial
assistance or scams intended to defraud the unwitting. Almost all of
these messages go to people who did not ask to receive them. Also,
some people use email in denial-of-service attacks, using various
methods to flood someone's emailbox with so many messages that their
email becomes unusable. These are examples of abuse -of- the email
system.
Also, it is possible to impersonate, threaten, disparage, or
otherwise harass someone via email. These are examples of abuse
-on- the email system.
Notable exceptions to bulk email abuse are legitimate mailing lists,
where people subscribe to receive messages pertaining to a
particular subject. These lists can be large, and they can account
for large numbers of messages being sent, but they are in no way
abuse of the email system. Quite the opposite, in fact - they are a
perfect example of the productive power of email.
What is 'unsolicited email'?
Unsolicited email is any email message received where the recipient
did not specifically ask to receive it.
Taken by itself, unsolicited email does not constitute abuse; not
all unsolicited email is also undesired email. For example,
receiving 'unsolicited' email from a long-lost friend or relative is
certainly not abuse. The reason that it is defined separately is
that email abuse takes several forms, all of which begin with the
fact that the email received is unsolicited.
NOTE: Usenet convention holds that, by posting to a newsgroup, one is
tacitly soliciting individual, *topical* replies via email.
The following are examples of soliciting email:
- posting to Usenet or saying in a chat group:
"please send me email about foobars"
- sending email to an advertised auto-reply address:
"for more information, send email to info@some-isp.com"
- filling out a web form which explicitly mentions email:
"fill this out to get email about foo"
"fill this out to get on the mailing list about foo"
"check this box to get on the foo mailing list"
The following acts DO NOT, by themselves, constitute 'soliciting'
email:
- just posting a message to a Usenet newsgroup or any
other public forum (although individual, *topical*
replies to Usenet posts are have long-standing
status as normal Usenet practice)
- chatting in IRC or other chat groups
- simply visiting a web site
- filling out a survey form at a Web site
*that does not explicitly say it is for mailings*
- putting one's email address on any other form,
such as product registrations or magazine
subscriptions
- posting one's email address on a web page (web page
authors should clearly specify the reason an email
address appears on the page)
- entering into a business relationship or conducting a
business transaction; for example, purchasing a product
or service from a company, or downloading a free trial
version of a software product from a web site.
