[SpamCop-List] Re: A bad call, now history, nothing to be done.

[Glenn Daniels]

"Mike Easter" wrote
> Sean W wrote:
> > IANAL but I didn't think email was considered a medium for legal
> > notifications due to its public and unreliable status.
>
> ianal either, but I think that the notification process for any
> particular kind of legal process can be determined or mandated by the
> court.  Some notifications should take place in such and such national
> publication, say the Wall Street Journal.  Some by some other process.
>
> Depending upon how the court feels that the particular public affected by
> the issue can be reached 'the best' - maybe a some particular kind of
> registration process makes the affected public have all of their
> snailmail addies available and there aren't very many but the
> notification is very important so the court might require a snail with
> some kind of receipt.  Or, if there's no snail and no email then it
> becomes some kind of newspaper announcement or broadcast medium.  Then,
> how the newspaper announcement is accomplished is another thing - such
> and such 'advertisement' prominently vs the back pages in a little
> classified type announcement section.
>
> In the 'modern' world in which the affected class might 'all' have their
> email addies available and few with snails, the court might feel that
> email advisement is a better medium than tv, radio, newspaper, or snail -
> the court trying to be 'reasonable' in its judgment of how people handle
> their mail and their spam and their filters - for all the court thinks it
> knows about that - just like for all the court thinks it knows about how
> any of those other mediums might succeed in reaching or being exposed to
> the affected class.
>

FWIW, I do know legal boilerplate when I see it. And being as there
is nothing being marketed to anyone's unfair advantage, I predict the
legal teams who send these things have their own sense of what they
may and may not do. My wife IMO would not subscribe to such
emails from eBay but that she wants them.

As you two, IANAL. But the recipient is. I could not see where PayPal
sent it. Perhaps that might have looked self-serving, but who knows.
It appeared that an agreement was reached out of court, and notices
to affected PayPal users made more sense than putting it through a
more public media. Someone has records of the parties affected by the
settlement. In this case, my wife opened her account through eBay,
so eBay sends her the notice. For other PayPal users, they may have
been also notified by another third party standing between the litigants.

As posted, when I received it, I looked to the IP for some sense
of verification. The IP was not that used by PayPal in any other
emails from them. So I ran it by Sam Spade who sez this is
reply.paypal.com. That in itself smelled eBay to me, because she
has eBay whitelisted in. As items pass through her filters it actually
gets whitelisted in at least twice. So I asked Sam about reply.paypal.com,
and he sez eBay, Inc. Well, like the way it looks or feels or not, it
is legitimately hers to receive. I screwed the whole thing up by not
whitelisting it with SpamPal, before SpamPal updated with the
SCbl for the IP. It just did not occur to me that SpamCop would
blocklist the IP. I should have seen it coming.

Evenso, I could not help thinking that someone reported it as
spam. It didn't look scammy or smell phishy to me, and parsing
told me it came from eBay, not PayPal. IMO eBay fumbled
the ball, unintentionally, or otherwise by not being up front
and saying "look we are delivering this message to our subscribers
who hold or may have held PayPal accounts, blah-blah-blah, here
is the notice, it is also available to our clients on our website under
"News" or some such thing, and here is the notice:"

So eBay threw the ball badly, SpamCop throws their hands up
to block the ball, and the receiving end says we don't see the ball.
Truth be told, I saw it coming. And having set up her filters, I
half should have figured it would end up in the trash. And it
really is my bad that it took me ten days to rummage in the trash
looking for a "goody". In a way we are all somewhat responsible
for the bad delivery. The truth of the matter is that all the schemes
to ensure the delivery, at least in this instance worked. The sad
fact of the matter is that the resources are sorely taxed because
there is just so awful much spam to sort out to receive the
message at all.

I sincerely believe that the burden of stopping spam should not fall
on the receiver. Nor should the burden fall to me as an intercessor.
Nor should the burden fall to my ISP whose bandwidth is challenged
by the inordinate load of garbage being thrown in this direction.
That leaves the burden of controlling the spew with those responsible
for sending it. And the sooner they get the picture the better.

When I posted "A bad call, now history, nothing to be done."
I believe that is what I meant. I read my numbers: eight months
at 100 spams a day she has not seen, 24000 times they send s*
and 24000 times it misses. eBay sends something bordering on
unacceptable and it is delayed in being delivered. Altogether
acceptable stats AFAIAC. The only thing I see as unacceptable
is the signal to noise ratio we face.

There is only one reasonable place to turn to improve the signal
to noise ratio, and that is to pinpoint the source of the noise and
clamp down on the noise production. It may present itself at
times as a daunting problem, but if one looks at it as a problem
only, it is more clearly a doable problem. There may even be
a wonderful Einstein quotable on the matter, but it fails me
in the moment, so Castaneda fills the void:
"Behave as the eagle does when pursued by lesser birds: fly
to ever increasing heights at ever increasing speed until of
necessity they give up the pursuit" - not exactly the fit I was
hoping for, and I probably have the words all wrong, but
there are those who will doubtless catch the drift...

Have a Great Day Mike and Sean,
Glenn