JamSpam Community #4 The High-Volume Senders community consists of organizations and individuals that send high volumes of e-mail, often referred to as bulk e-mail. To qualify, the organization must engage in one-to-many "bulk" sends, where the same e-mail is sent to a large volume of recipients. For the purposes of neutrality, JamSpam does not distinguish between different types of bulk e-mail (newsletters, advertisements, spam, etc.). Coming up with a universally accepted definition of spam is like trying to define love. We know it when we see it (or feel it). Examples of high-volume senders are companies like CBS MarketWatch, MTV, United Airlines, and MobileInfo.com, and organizations like CodeAmber.org The content of their transmissions may or may not include news, information, advertisements, marketing, or commerce offerings.
State of the state: No chasm exists in the world of spam like the one that exists between this community and the end users who are sick of unwelcome e-mail. The various members of this community spend an inordinate amount of resources, in many cases unsuccessfully, to guarantee the delivery of their transmissions to the intended recipients. Standing in their way are technologies, laws, and policies that have a difficult time discriminating between e-mail that is welcomed by the intended recipients and e-mail that the intended recipients don't want (and that those recipients often consider to be spam). Part of the problem is that the same transmission that is welcomed by some recipients is classified as spam by others.
Central to the controversy that involves this community is the basis of their entitlement to the inboxes to which their transmissions are targeted. Many members of this community have formed their own organizations to help manage that entitlement on behalf of their constituents. Examples of these organizations are the E-mail Service Providers Coalition, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and the Council for Responsible E-mail (CRE) .
Report card: The various members of this community are working frantically to find a way to keep laws, technologies, and policies from preventing the delivery of their e-mail. As with the ISP and inbox provider community, some degree of intra-community organization is a good sign, and a necessary prerequisite to this community's ability to present a united front to the other communities and to the world.
Grade: D Unfortunately, this community currently shows no promise of coming together to agree on anything. This invariably has to do with the competing interests of the various sub-communities and the overall community's failure to see that the outside world primarily views all of the members of this community similarly. Furthermore, this community's efforts -- often based on a set of certifiable best practices that would keep ISPs and lawmakers off the backs of high-volume senders--were developed without significant input from the end users, the community that is most concerned about the practices of bulk e-mailers. Until these sub-communities get together and form a united front, finding a long-term solution to the spam problem will be like herding cats.
Honorable mentions: The E-mail Service Provider Coalition's Trevor Hughes engaged members of two other communities (TRUSTe from the non-profit end-user privacy and antispam advocacy community and the ePrivacyGroup from the e-mail security and management provider community) to arrive at an inter-community solution. While the inter-community effort should be recognized as a philosophical step in the right direction, the solution itself has not received widespread support from the Internet community. Also, the CRE's Kevin Noonan volunteered to be one of the framers of the JamSpam constitution.
The Bound to Confuse Award goes to the Council for Responsible E-mail and the Direct Marketing Association. Technically speaking, the DMA owns the Association for Interactive Marketing (AIM) and the CRE is a part of the AIM. However, the two groups --- the DMA and the CRE --- have different antispam policies and agendas. If the DMA and its own affiliates can't orchestrate a unified front, the likelihood of the entire community of high-volume senders coming together is not good.
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