[timr]

You're making a distinction that doesn't work. At what point does an email become "tailored"? Five words? Ten? If someone sends you an unsolicited sales pitch that is mostly identical to the one they're sending to five hundred other people, but uses your name and adds a sentence saying that they "admire the work you've done with $X", is it no longer spam?

You can't define a standard for illegal behavior that encompasses most of what the medium is designed to do.

[copsarebastards]

> You're making a distinction that doesn't work. At what point does an email become "tailored"? Five words? Ten? If someone sends you an unsolicited sales pitch that is mostly identical to the one they're sending to five hundred other people, but uses your name and adds a sentence saying that they "admire the work you've done with $X", is it no longer spam?

Trying to measure this by word count is completely socially inept. It's not about word count, it's about the fact that they don't actually give a crap about me or my goals: they're just trying to sell me their product. I don't care if 100% of the words in the message are hand-crafted to appeal to me: if they're just trying to convert me as a revenue stream instead of actually trying to address me as a person, I don't want to hear from them, even once.

[linkregister]

You can and it was defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

Also, your example falls under the Compliant class of emails under the act.

Edit: (since I can't reply to a poster from whom I received a down vote)

I agree, the act is too narrow in my opinion. I don't equate clicking "spam" with compliance with the law. I was simply stating that the parent post's "slippery slope" assertion wasn't accurate in this case.

[DanBC]

Email compliant with lax US law may well be spam.

Compliance with law is not sufficient to stop me (and many other people) from just reporting as spam.

[alanh]

Your post reads like a satire of SV mindset - overly literal, overly self-assured, totally ignorant of how the world outside of a logic system actually works, and consequently choosing the libertarian or technoanarchist "throw it all out" approach.

Laws always have some room for interpretation.

[timr]

Ha! I'm neither a libertarian nor a technoanarchist -- in fact, I'm frequently arguing with those types on HN. But thanks for the laugh.

Laws have room for interpretation, but again, they can't be written in a way that includes legitimate uses as illegal behavior, or the law is worse than useless. Define a rule that says (essentially) "you know spam when you see it", and you end up where pornography is: email marketing will be legal, with random, ineffective, arbitrary restrictions that make business within the domain unseemly and difficult.

Said another way: criminalize unsolicited email and only criminals will send emails.

[alanh]

Well, that’s true — I don’t want all unsolicited email to be banned — although the types of unsolicited mail I want are narrow enough to almost be defined (and thus solicited).

There is perhaps a distinction that could go really far, though: unsolicited email from and on behalf of an individual, not a company, legal entity, or service provider, is 1000× more likely to be acceptable than the latter!

[DanBC]

> that encompasses most of what the medium is designed to do.

What? That's wrong. UBE has always been hated, ever since the Project Gutenberg guy tried to email the US constitution to everyone who had an email address.

[oxide]

actually, it does work. a template is a pretty clear concept, a fill-in-the-blanks form that is sent out en masse. an email becomes a "template" when it is used as a template.

[timr]

My theoretical marketer isn't using a template! He's writing a customized sentence or two specific to every recipient. And if that isn't enough, he's using a statistical model to change the wording of the offer, and select the content of the paragraphs, images, etc. based on your location, age and industry. The email is specific to you in every way -- it's just mostly generated by a machine.

You can't win this game.