EuroCAUCE FAQ

1. Who or What?
2. Anything to do with that lot trying to get laws passed against UCE in the U.S.A.?
3. All right, what's so different, then?
4. What does all this have to do with email?
5. So what is the problem?
6. But isn't advertising email the same as...?
7. I'm getting very few "hits" on my Web site, so I need to advertise it more widely.
8. But surely, you can just delete or filter the email you don't want?
9. Come now, it's only one little email?
10. So why are you people wasting your connection and personal time with this?
11. Isn't non-commercial broadcast email just as annoying as the commercial kind?
12. What about Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, and so on?
13. How did they get my address?
14. What of those "12 Million Email Addresses!" CDs one keeps reading about?
15. How can I get hold of reliable email addresses?
16. How do you define 'spam', then?
17. Is it still 'spam' even if ... ?
18. What is "Double Opt-In"?

Q1. Who or What?

A. The European Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.

Q2. Anything to do with that lot trying to get laws passed against UCE in the U.S.A.?

A. We take our original inspiration from the Stateside CAUCE and have received invaluable help from them in the initial organisational phases. Our agendas are quite distinct, however, because the campaign in Europe will be rather different from its transatlantic counterpart.

Q3. All right, what's so different, then?

A. For a start, the entire governmental framework is completely different. The Constitution of the United States of America grants certain powers (such as foreign relations and regulation of interstate commerce) to the federal government. The European Union is made up of a number of nation-states who, according to the Treaty of Rome, have agreed to pool sovereignty in certain matters, such as commerce.

In practical terms this means that, subject to the limitations set out in the Constitution, the Congress of the United States can enact laws which ultimately the federal government is expected to enforce. European 'legislation', by contrast takes the form of Directives which are often proposed by the Commission, amended and adopted by the Parliament, and further amended and adopted by the Council (of Ministers). These Directives have no direct force of law, rather they set the overall guidelines for national legislation in the various member states. The Commission's job is to oversee this process and report to the Parliament concerning the implementation of the Directives.

A full explanation of the stuctures and functions of the organs of the European Union can be found at http://europa.eu.int/

Another feature of the European polity and its growing internal market is the segmentation of the market for advertisements due to language differences. There is little call for advertisements in Finnish for the French market, nor is there much for advertisements in Spanish directed to Sweden. All in all, there are 12 official languages and several minority languages.

Q4. What does all this have to do with email?

A. In the United States, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email is lobbying for an amendment to Title 47, United States Code, Section 227 which would extend the ban against unsolicited advertising by fax to include email. In Europe, a Directive was issued on 20 May 1997 concerning "Distance Contracts". http://europa.eu.int:80/comm/dg24/policy/developments/dist_sell/dist01_en.html

Of interest here is Article 10, which states:-

Article 10

Restrictions on the use of certain means of distance communication

1. Use by a supplier of the following means requires the prior consent of the consumer: - automated calling system without human intervention (automatic calling machine), - facsimile machine (fax).

2. Member States shall ensure that means of distance communication, other than those referred to in paragraph 1, which allow individual communications may be used only where there is no clear objection from the consumer.

Thus email has been excluded from the category where tireless automata are allowed to communicate to human beings and their apparatus of limited capacity. Under the stipulations of Article 14, however, a member state can take more restrictive measures, or leave more restrictive legislation unchanged, in the interests of protecting consumers. It would be desirable, even at this late date, to campaign for a more restrictive "opt-in" approach to be adopted for email in each member state, as legislation according to this Directive is introduced or amended.

There is another Directive concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the telecommunications sector, DIRECTIVE 97/66/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 15 December 1997, http://www2.echo.lu/legal/en/dataprot/protection.html

Q5. So what is the problem?

A. Unlike any other medium, the lion's share of the marginal cost of message transfer with email is borne by the recipients. In a one-on-one exchange of email, it is arguable that the costs are shared about equally between sender and recipient, but with broadcast email the sender pays once for a message which may be replicated hundreds of times. There is also a factor of storage costs: in order for a mail system to function without the end user having to be logged on continuously, the Post Office Protocol enables messages to be (temporarily) stored in a "mailbox" until collected. The costs of maintaining this facility are passed on to the user as part of the subscription charge.

With facsimile systems, the sender pays the telephone charges, but the recipient contributes in the form of either specially treated paper, or more ordinary paper with ink or toner. The arrival of hundreds of unwanted messages can be irksome, however. Paper runs out, ink and toner cost money as well, and a businessperson can walk into the office on a Monday and wonder how many orders or customer enquiries were lost while the floor is covered with useless advertisements and the "out of paper/ink/toner" lights are flashing. "War dialers" (automated systems for playing a recorded message to recipients dialed in sequence) are literally and figuratively inhuman. That it was seen as desirable to restrict both of these forms of communication should come as little surprise.

In an environment where often the newly-privatised successors of the telecommunications departments of various Post Offices have inherited the monopoly, whilst renouncing the "public service" ethos of their predecessors (and having acquired a certain rapacity from the time immediately prior to privatisation when rate increases over and above inflation were often allowed in order to make these enterprises more attractive to potential investors), it stands to reason that telecommunications are relatively expensive and will continue to be so for the forseeable future. Given the background of higher telecommunications charges coupled with language barriers, it is not too surprising that a "junk fax" or a "war dialer" industry has yet to emerge on this side of "the pond". The costs of reaching a sufficient number of potential customers by these methods are simply prohibitive.

With email, the possibility exists of maintaining only local connections, and letting the Internet ensure that the message is delivered eventually. A sender in Alicante can quite happily broadcast messages to subscribers from Athens to Aberdeen, all of whom will have to pay telecommunications charges to receive such missives. Here the marginal costs to the sender are negligible and if a message should be inappropriate in language or content, it simply doesn't matter. The Portuguese who does not understand a message in Danish for super offer of little interest to anyone south of Padborg would be expected to simply delete the message and leave it at that, even though the same message cost money to receive. The messages themselves get bigger, sometimes being loaded with graphics or HTML. The latest wheeze is the inclusion of special scripts which, invoked by a browser-based mail handler, automatically go to a Web page, whose content, more often than not, is not generally seen as acceptable for children. The only limiting factor at in the past was the low number of subscribers. A survey in Germany in 1996 indicated that 78% of the population had never heard of the Internet, nor did they know what it was. This has changed dramatically since then.

Q6. But isn't advertising email the same as...?

A. No. Advertisements sent by post are paid for by the sender. It can be argued what kind of postal traffic subsidises another kind but the common factor is that the sender pays, and therefore tries to ensure that the mail is sent to potential customers. Broadcast media likewise: the advertiser pays. The cover prices of most printed publications go toward the distribution costs, and the rest of the costs are borne by advertisers. There is a "self-limiting" factor which always operates here: where advertisers pay costs, they (naturally) try to ensure that their message goes out only to those able and willing to buy the merchandise offered.

The factors tending towards "self-regulation", i.e. cost and diminishing probabilities of sales with distance, hardly apply with email.

Q7. I'm getting very few "hits" on my Web site, so I need to advertise it more widely.

A. Unsolicited Bulk or Commercial Email is not the way. There are far better and more effective ways of increasing traffic to your Web site, see http://www.activenet-marketing.co.uk/ and visit the Site Doctor's surgery.

Q8. But surely, you can just delete or filter the email you don't want?

A. What we do with our mail once we've received it is our business. Most filters work after the email has been downloaded from the server, that is after it has been paid for. "Server-level" filters are not as widespread, and even their operation uses connect time. Even if the Internet service is 'flat-rate', telecommunication charges are often incurred as a function of time. Good filters do not maintain themselves, either, and their maintenance costs time, and effort, which can translate to money.

Q9. Come now, it's only one little email?

A. Advertising emails vary in size from "two-lines" promoting a Web site to the equivalent of three or four A4 pages. Increasingly, other "enhancements" are added which places a greater burden on resources. One snowflake is of no significance, but many make a traffic-stopping, house-burying blizzard.

Q10. So why are you people wasting your connection and personal time with this?

A. We consider it an investment: a stitch in time which saves nine, an ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure.

Q11. Isn't non-commercial broadcast email just as annoying as the commercial kind?

A. Yes, but there isn't the same "driving force" as with commercial communications. These latter are expected to finance themselves out of increased turnover, and a commercial organisation would have resources that a political or charity organisation would not. However, the low cost to the sender of email can be very tempting to charities and other organisations which would seek to persuade people to donate money or give their votes. It will be our task to convince them of the inadvisability of choosing a medium by which they would only annoy the very people they seek to influence.

Q12. What about Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, and so on?

A. A founding principle of the Council of Europe and the European Community (now Union) is freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. However, the "freedom to be left alone" is another cornerstone of European liberty and democracy. From Germany's Basic Law:

§1 (1) Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect it is the duty of all state authority.

§2 (1) Everyone has the right to free development of his personality insofar as he does not violate the rights of others or offend against the constitutional order or against morality.

Principles such as these are equally enshrined in the European Convention for Human Rights, as mentioned in these points taken from paragraph (17) of the preamble to the "Distance Contracts" Directive:-

• the principles set out in Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950 apply;
• the consumer's right to privacy, particularly as regards freedom from certain particularly intrusive means of communication, should be recognised;
• specific limits on the use of such means should therefore be stipulated;
• Member States should take appropriate measures to protect effectively those consumers, who do not wish to be contacted through certain means of communication, against such contacts, without prejudice to the particular safeguards available to the consumer under Community legislation concerning the protection of personal data and privacy;

In a similar vein, Germany's Law on Unfair Competition starts off with,

§1 Whoever in the course of business competition institutes practices which offend against good manners can be enjoined to cease and desist or to pay damages.

It can be seen that the "in your face" kind of promotion does not get a sympathetic reception in Europe. We at EuroCAUCE feel that we are working entirely "with the grain" in maintaining and furthering acceptable business practice with regard to the use of email.

Q13. How did they get my address?

A. As a result of almost any net.participation: maintaining a Web page, posting to Usenet, participating in IRC and other "chat" fora. There are many automated systems for "harvesting" these addresses. One of the most heavily "harvested" Usenet newsgroups is news.admin.net-abuse.email - which means that UCE gets sent to those people who have the motivation and the means to see to it that senders' accounts get cancelled and their websites closed.

Even Web surfers can be vulnerable to address harvesting. One trick is to set up an FTP transfer where the email address is sent as the FTP password. This can be avoided by disabling the automatic sending of the email address as an FTP password. Another trick involves the usage of JavaScript, and the risk of one's address being gathered can be minimised by disabling JavaScript by default and only enabling it when visiting particular trusted sites.

Run a security check on your browser at http://Privacy.net/analyze/.

For more information, see How do spammers harvest email addresses? or the Spam Address FAQ

Q14. What of those "12 Million Email Addresses!" CDs one keeps reading about?

A. A lot of those addresses are, simply put, no good. They are for accounts which are no longer active or completely nonexistent. Very often people alter or "mung" their addresses when participating in newsgroups or chat fora, which means that the gathered address will not be valid. Note further that these collections of addresses are not even a good representative sample of all net.participants, either. There are many, many people who simply surf the Web, never giving out their email addresses to anyone except close friends and relatives.

Q15. How can I get hold of reliable email addresses?

A. By gathering them yourself, from people who have clearly indicated that they want to get email from you. There may not be as many, but, unlike the "scatter-gun" approach, they are all potential leads.

Q16. How do you define 'spam', then?

A. The term 'spam' as applied to email has come to mean email which

1. has not been explicitly requested by the recipient and
    
2. is not specifically directed to the person (or rôle) behind the address, but to a 'target' (i.e. the sender cannot provide a valid reason, acceptable to an independent party, as to why that email was sent to that particular person) and
    
3. (as a consequence of 2) may be sent in bulk, i.e. to more than one recipient.

A more 'official-sounding' term is Unsolicited Broadcast / Bulk Email (UBE).

Discussion: from the Monty Python sketch to an attempt at flooding a Multi-User rôle-playing game, the actual term 'spam' came to mean "the same thing, many, many times". In relation to net.abuse it was first applied to Excessive Cross- and/or Multi-Posting of substantively identical articles on Usenet. A metric was developed known as the Breidbart Index where the number of postings was multiplied by the square root of the number of groups posted to, and thresholds were later implemented by what passed for consensus in the various news hierarchies for cancels and filtering. An important thing to remember here is that Usenet is by nature public, so the provider's view and the user's views are similar, if not identical.

Email is, by contrast, a one-to-one medium, which can, however, be used (and misused) in a one-to-many mode. The recipient's and the provider's views are not identical: a given recipient may well get only one copy from a run of tens of thousands of messages. In extreme cases, the extra load on a given provider's mail servers may be enough to cause malfunction, but more often than not the first notification that something is wrong is when reports or complaints arrive from aggrieved recipients. (It is useful to note here that, in order to avoid 'setting off the alarm bells' at their own providers, senders of Unsolicited Bulk Email will often attempt one or more subterfuges: either misusing a third party's server for amplification and misdirection (referred to as 'relay rape') or using some form of 'direct to Mail Exchange' software which bypasses the provider's outgoing mail server entirely.)

It is unavoidable that the first step in determining whether a given message can be considered 'spam' is a subjective evaluation on the part of the recipient as to whether the message is Unsolicited and impersonal or Broadcast. The questions are posed, "Did I ask for it?" and "Is it directed to me, or could it be directed to anybody?" Single emails directed to the person are very often Unsolicited, mailing list traffic is almost by definition Broadcast. Note here that 'personalized' is not the same as 'personal'. It is possible to generate automatically indivdual messages with unique salutations which nevertheless are not addressed to the person, and sometimes the results are simply laughable (e.g. "Dear Comments,"). Generally speaking, it is a trivial exercise for a human recipient to determine whether a given message is 'personal' or not, even if it may not be possible to develop suitable heuristics which would enable a machine to do so.

Unless a given recipient has more than one address, the question of quantity or Bulk usually does not arise at the recipient's end: it would have to be determined by the provider where the message originated as to whether it was a single event or part of a larger pattern. RIPE 206 (Good Practice for combating Unsolicited Bulk Email) does not set a criterion for Bulk as such, but states that "just two reports which give identical messages MUST be considered to be evidence of bulk sending", and that a single report may or may not be considered to be sufficient evidence.

The are cases where a message is Unsolicited and Bulk, yet would be acceptable: wedding invitations addressed to several hundred family members and friends form one example. Here, the 'acceptable to an independent person' criterion would apply: a 'reasonable person' would find it perfectly in order that family and friends would be notified: they are, after all, being addressed as persons and not as 'targets'. This would be in direct contrast with a message sent to all participants in a given newsgroup, simply because their addresses happened to appear in that particular forum.

There are often cases where a rôle or function is being addressed rather than the actual natural person who happens to be carrying out that function. This is acceptable insofar as matters relating to that rôle or function form the content of the message. An example of this would be an abuse report directed at abuse-reporting addresses for several different providers: a 'spamming' incident could well involve one ISP's dial-up, another's open relay, and yet a third's 'ancilliary services' such as websites, 'drop boxes' or the like. It is sometimes desirable to include certain authorities as well, especially where illegal material is sent or offered.

Q17. Is it still 'spam', even if ... ?

• The advertiser's real name and contact details are included?
   
• Instructions for 'opting out' are given?
   
• Legitimate products or services are offered?

A. Yes. Unless the sender can supply a valid reason acceptable to an independent third party as to why that particular email was sent to that particular recipient, then in all probability it is 'spam'. See above. The issue is consent, not content.

Q18. What is "Double Opt-In"?

A term invented or at least propagated by the marketing community for confirmed opt-in. Derived from the two-step subscription-and-confirmation procedure frequently used for well-run automated lists. See discussion.