quietlife.net

spam?

07 May 2005

This is unusual. I got e-mail yesterday:

From: david goldenberg
Subject: Electric Car Record?
To: [email protected]
Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 13:54:38 -0700
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627

Hey Chris,

Thought you might like this piece about cars for My Quiet Life. It’s
from Gelf Magazine, where I work.

What’s the land-speed record for electric vehicles? It depends on whom
you ask, writes Carl Bialik. Yesterday, a British electric-vehicle team
landed a story in the Associated Press heralding their quest to break
the 300 mph barrier. But a group of students at Ohio State have already
accomplished that feat-are the British attempting to cash in on a
technicality?
http://www.gelfmagazine.com/mt/archives/fast_and_loose.html

At first I thought it was legitimate but on closer inspection I think it’s fairly obvious that this message was a template and probably sent to many people – namely that “cars” is a defined category on my blog, and “My Quiet Life” is the official name, which someone is unlikely to use so literally. The template is probably “Thought you might like this piece about %%CATEGORYNAME%% for %%BLOGNAME%%. It’s from Gelf Magazine, where I work.”

Presumably if this person reads my blog often enough to know that I actually focus on car talk enough to send me a link, he will also read this and clear up the confusion, but I think this was just a distributed message. Anyone else get this?

This poses an interesting dilemma for me as a crusading anti-spammer. The article he sent me is actually pretty interesting, but do I condone this by linking to it? (Obviously I sorta have, in posting this, but hey.) Is this spam, or is this a perfectly legitimate way to distribute content to interested parties? A difficult question.

Comments

Jackson — May 09, 2005 at 12:40 · reply
That was essentially a press release. If it was automated then they did a great job. It goes back to the whole long-tail thing. How do you send press releases to the many small publishers who each have a few [hundred thousand] readers. It has to be automated.

I think we will see lots more of this.

David Goldenberg — May 10, 2005 at 15:00 · reply

Hey Chris – As a relatively new online mag, Gelf needs someone to get the word out about interesting articles we write. In many cases, that falls to me – but I do not (or try not to, at least) send out spam. I try to find a few specific blogs or sites that I think might be interested, and I try to send out an informative blurb that includes why the particular article might be of interest to the site. Most times, this involves sites I have read before (including yours), though I also look for sites I am not that familiar with that are covering the particular topic we reported on. In this case, I knew you covered cars, and I just wanted to make sure you knew where we were coming from. And Jackson, I guess it qualifies as a (an unautomated) press release, but I hope you’ll think it differs from spam. What do you guys think? Is this a legit way of trying to get the word out?

cwage — May 10, 2005 at 22:13 · reply

This is interesting. I think the fact that you came back to the page and responded in person to vouch for the e-mail you sent puts you well ahead of any consideration as a straight-up spammer.

But it is an interesting situation.

The general definition of spam is generally an electronic message that is a) unsolicted and b) bulk. By this very strict definition, your e-mail to me qualifies. However, for instance, on Spamhaus’s What is Spam? page, they elaborate:

An electronic message is “spam” IF:

(1)the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2)the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.

Here I think it’s clear that the context of the e-mail and my personal identity are not irrelevant, since you obviously targeted me because you knew it was an interesting link and that I posted stuff about cars, and that’s what in the end makes it okay. By virtue of running this blog and having a category on “cars”, I think I am giving some measure of consent to be solicited with an e-mail like this. The water gets murkier when you start talking about people trying to actively sell something versus just “getting the word out”.

I’d be interested to see what others thought, though.

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