Recruiter spam

[Bruce Richardson]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 05:41:53PM +0100, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> paddy at panici.net wrote:
> >>That acid test for spam or unsolicited mail is whether the sender is  
> >>trying to disguise their identity and the origin of the email or not..   
> >>    
> >
> >huh?  Which part of unsolicited are you having a problem with ?
> >  
> 
> I meant to determine if an email should be classed as spam or UCE.  I 
> phrased that badly, sorry.

Even so, to say that Spam is UCE with forged headers is an arbitrary
categorisation and not one I would agree with.  Forged sender
credentials are very common in spam and one of the characteristics most
commonly used to detect it but it's not a defining characteristic.  As
far as I'm concerned, UCE is just another name for E-mail Spam and any
notion that one is a specialised subset of the other is just spurious
rationalisation.  Don't forget that the term originated in Usenet and is
now applied generally to mass unsolicited messages in all kinds of media
(SMS, fax, blogs, wikis); in several of those, the vast majority of spam
does not hide or forge the sender details.

-- 
Bruce

The ice-caps are melting, tra-la-la-la.  All the world is drowning,
tra-la-la-la-la.  -- Tiny Tim.