CONNECTIONISTS policy on spam (unsolicited commercial email)

[Dave_Touretzky@cs.cmu.edu]

Recently I have seen a rash of conference announcements appearing in
my personal mailbox, often from conferences I've never heard of
before.  There seems to be a trend, mainly in Europe but also
sometimes in the US, to advertise academic conferences by spamming, as
well as by the more socially acceptable means of Usenet newsgroup
postings and messages to private mailing lists.  The policy of the
CONNECTIONISTS list is that we will not accept any announcements for
conferences that engage in email spamming of personal mailboxes.

Let me be clear about what "spamming" means.  There is nothing wrong
with a conference organizer sending email announcements to persons who
have an established relationship with that conference, i.e., attendees
from prior years, authors of papers submitted to the conference, or
anyone who has written the conference asking for information.

However, if a conference organizer uses the email addresses of people
who have no prior relationship to the conference, e.g., people who
merely posted to a newsgroup like comp.ai.neural-nets, or mentioned
neural networks on their personal home page, or are known in the field
from their publications in other conferences, that is spamming. Those
people have not given even implicit permission to place their names on
a mailing list.  Sending unsolicited mail to such people is antisocial
behavior, even if the message contains instructions for how to get off
the mailisg list.

The Connectionists list operates with a "zero tolerance" policy toward
spamming.  One of the reasons the list is moderated is the need to
filter spam.  Neural network conference announcements are NOT spam
when sent to this mailing list; they are entirely apporpriate.  But we
will not cooperate with any conference that spams personal mailboxes.

For our European friends: the spam problem is currently far worse in
the US than in Europe.  Bills have been proposed in the US Congress to
make spamming illegal, but none have passed yet.  It is very important
that we not create loopholes for "acceptable" spam, such as academic
conference announcements, as such loopholes will undermine the legal
argument that sending ANY email solicitation to private individuals
without their permission should be banned.  (Due to freedom of speech
considerations, if conference announcements are considered "okay",
then porno spam and advertisements for financial scams also have to be
allowed.  And we don't want that.)

Anyone who wants to learn more about the spam problem and how to fight
it is invited to visit the following web sites:

CAUCE -- Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
  http://www.cauce.org
and especially
  http://www.cauce.org/resources.html

Fight Spam on the Internet!
  http://spam.abuse.net/


-- Dave Touretzky, Connectionists moderator