[NTLUG:Discuss] [Off-Topic] Why the message was spam [was [Off-Topic] Free Software Consortium...]

[Steve Baker]

I don't know if I'd have labelled it Spam - the crucially bad thing about
Spam is that the spammer sends out millions of completely ill-directed
mails in order to find the tiny handful of people who really need to see
it.  The ratio of people who are annoyed by the arrival of junk mail to
the people who are happy to see it is HUGE - and the harm caused greatly
outweighs the good.

This wasn't as bad as that.  There was actually a reasonable probablility
that a good fraction of list members might be interested...so the ratio
of harm to good was relatively small - not enough to label it as Spam IMHO.

However, the posting was extremely rude and ill-concieved for the one
simple reason that this group maintains a separate mailing list EXPLICITLY
for job adverts.  That's a clear statement by the group that we don't
want this kind of post on the main list - and that the poster could have
reached a more targetted audience by sending it to the correct list where
it would have been welcomed with open arms.

The poster will now claim that they didn't know of the existance of
the job postings list.

That simply reveals that they didn't follow the other cardinal rule
of posting this kind of material - which is to check first before
posting commercial material - and to lurk on a mailing list for a
while before you post to find out what kind of a list it is.

Now I've gone and broken the third cardinal rule - which is not to
spend inordinate amounts of time talking about off-topic posts since
that just magnifies the harm that they do.

Damn!
---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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