[2512] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Advertising
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brad Templeton)
Fri Mar 13 06:27:09 1992
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9203130754.AA05014@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 92 2:35:11 PST
From: brad@looking.clarinet.com (Brad Templeton)
I also feel that there needs to be a technological solution to this.
We must take the concept of "caller ID" much further, in a sense.
Of course E-mail has already done that. (And few could imagine an
E-mail system where the *default* was anonymous mail -- some would even
say it should be impossible.)
Anyway we must establish standards for classification of incoming mail
in a number of formalized ways.
We want to know who it's from, of course, and we already know that, as
well as who it's to and various other header fields.
We want to know the purpose. Is it private communication? A reply?
Solicited or Unsolicited commercial information or advertising? A
mailing list message?
We want to know the priority. Is it urgent? An emergency? Stuff that
can be dealt with tomorrow or next week or at an unspecified time?
If it's commercial, we want to know how it's targeted. Is it
solicited? Is it bulk mail? Was my address purchased on a rented
mailing list or have I had direct contact with the company before?
Of course, adding extra headers to mail is easy. I bring this up here
because we may want to filter mail even before it gets to my system.
Ie. if efficiency is a concern, it may be the case that when a junk
mailer makes an SMTP connection to my system, my system might want to
say, "no unsolicited commercial mail to rented lists for user X accepted"
before even taking the body of the message.
Otherwise, of course, our own mail filters can handle it when it gets to us.
The only "legislative" concern would be rules pressuring people who send
mail to classify their mail. Deliberately sending mail under the wrong
classification (ie. junk mail as a personal message) would be some sort
of offence -- likely to get all mail from the offending site/user cut off
at the recipient site -- or the whole network if it is truly a legislative
solution.
