Define "spam"

A comment came through recently from Trent asking me to define spam. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about how I define spam, so let’s look at it.
Personally, I describe spam as unsolicited bulk email. If I didn’t ask for it and it looks like bulk mail then I consider it spam. In many cases the spammers have multiple email addresses of mine so I can demonstrate the mail was sent in bulk.
In my consulting and working with clients, though, I rarely use the word spam. There are so many different definitions of spam, I have no way to know if my clients understand what I am saying, so I avoid the term as much as humanly possible. An example of some of the few definitions of spam I’ve seen used over the years.

  • unsolicited bulk email
  • unsolicited commercial email
  • mail I don’t want
  • mail I don’t think my customers want
  • mail that is identical/similar to mail that hit my spamtrap
  • mail that was sent to a non-existent address at my domain
  • mail that contains HTML
  • unsolicited email
  • mail that advertises Viagra or porn sites or similar
  • mail that other people send

With my clients we talk about how the client’s mail is perceived by the various groups and why their mail might be blocked or filtered. For those cases, it’s useful to look at the definitions used by organizations doing the blocking.
Spamhaus and some other blocking lists use “unsolicited bulk email” as their definition. Many of the listings rely on mail to spamtraps. IPs sending mail to addresses not given to anyone, are sending unsolicited and presumably bulk mail. Thus that IP gets listed. They also have other lists that monitor snowshoe behaviour as well as listing domains. Spamhaus, and other blocklists believe that if a mailer is sending one piece of email to a user who did not request it, then they are likely mailing many other users who did not request any mail. This definition centers around permission, and any mail without permission is considered spam.
Many of the large ISPs use “mail our users complain about” as their definition. With this definition, they do not have to argue permission status with a sender. The data shows that their customers complain about mail from that sender or with that URL. The ISPs are going to block, or deliver to the bulk folder, email that their users do not want.
Filters and some blocking lists use “mail that has characteristics of mail we know is unsolicited bulk mail” as their definition. These characteristics can be things like an invalid HELO string, or lack of reverse DNS on the connecting IP address, or badly formatted HTML. Mail that looks like spam, in the technical sense, is often treated like spam.
Spam is a term that means different things to almost everyone. However, to answer your request, Trent: when I mention spam here on the blog without an accompanying explanation of the term, I’m talking about unsolicited bulk email.
This post is an updated version of  What really is spam, anyway?. I also talk about the definition of spam in Defining Spam

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Delivery lore

Number of people believing outrageous statements on the Internet
(Image from Bad Astronomy)
Almost every delivery consultant, delivery expert or deliverability blog offers their secrets to understanding spam filters. As a reader, though, how do you know if the author knows what they’re talking about? For instance, on one of the major delivery blogs had an article today saying that emails with a specific subject line will not get past spam filters.
This type of statement is nothing new. The lore around spam filters and what they do and do not do permeates our industry. Most of the has achieved the status of urban legend, and yet is still repeated as gospel. Proof? I sent an email with the subject line quoted in the above blog post to my aol, yahoo, gmail and hotmail accounts. Within 3 minutes of sending the email it was in the inbox of all 4 accounts
I can come up with any number of reasons why the email ended up in my inbox, rather than being caught by spam filters as the delivery expert originally claimed. But none of those reasons really matter. The expert in question is spreading delivery lore that is demonstrably false. Emails with that subject line will get through spam filters. I even added an extra 4 exclamation points in the subject line.
Not all delivery lore is true. In fact, most lore involving “always” “all” “never” or “none” is not going to be true. Just because you read it on the internet, and because it came from someone claiming to know what they’re talking about does not absolve individual senders from critically thinking about the information.

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Who is Julia and why won't she leave me alone?

There seems to be some new spam software in use. Julia <random last name> keeps telling me about her new webcam, how much she wants to date me and wants to know when I want to visit. These spams started February 1. I’ve had 179 caught by my MUA filters, and 152 caught by spamassassin (SA score >7 are filtered to a special account).
This is exactly the type of pattern that causes people to write filters that years later people look at and ask why someone thought this was a reasonable marker for spam.
The good folks over at MailChimp have examined some of the scoring rules that their clients trigger. They found some “Julia” type markers. Some oddities they reported on:

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Spam or not spam

I have been a bit behind on my blog reading recently, and am slowly going through my RSS feed catching up with what everyone has had to say about spam in the last few weeks.
One of the articles that caught my attention was a post from VerticalResponse discussing the response to a marketing campaign from one of their customers. It seems to me the point of the post is to defend the VerticalResponse mail to the customer. The mail VerticalResponse sent was not spam. Why this is true is not made clear, other than the mail was not pills spam, phishing or porn.
Contrasting with that article is a post a friend pointed out to me today. This article goes to the other extreme, and seems to say that any one-to-many email is spam and should not be sent. While trying to find his point, the author does take the step of exempting any opt-in marketing from his definition. The confusing bit is that the statistics he is using are compiled by MailerMailer, who have a very clear anti-spam policy and allow only permission based marketing.
What both posts seem to be missing is that, these days, spam is in the eye of the receiver, not the sender. There are customers who groan every time they receive mail from their vendor. Eventually, they may lash out at a sender and complain about the email. At that point, a sender is now dealing with an angry person, and arguing the mail is no spam is not going to diffuse the situation. On the flip side, there are people who are very happy to receive mail, even advertising and marketing mail, from vendors. Even if they do not “open” the mail (read: load images in the email), they may be opening, reading and acting on the offers in the email.
Email marketing is a valuable tool, when it is done correctly and focuses on the receiver’s needs and wants. It is when marketers ignore the individuals they are mailing that they are more likely to see complaints or problems.

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