Anyone else been spammed by Andy Boland at "Function5 Technology
Group"?
-r
I'm not sure it's fair to class the e-mail as "spam", but he is one persistent fellow. My company made list for some of the equipment we retired for purchase, and his Cisco buyer never got back to me. So the excess inventory is being offered to another reseller.
There does seem to be a disconnect between the front office and the back office. That could be part of the reason for the mailout repetition.
Given we’re going down this “what is spam” rathole again, spam is generally defined as unsolicited BULK email
As the email appears to be one to one, though a remarkably persistent one to one, I would suggest procmail, unless you know he’s harvested nanog and is sending the same offer mail merged to a bunch of operators.
—srs
Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com> writes:
Given we�(TM)re going down this �oewhat is spam�Y\.. rathole again, spam is
generally defined as unsolicited BULK email
Correct, and moreover it's generally conceded that having a perl
script insert "Dear Robert" at the beginning of the email message is
insufficient for it to not be "bulk", particularly if it's general and
has nothing to do with any kind of specialized knowledge of your
company beyond the fact that you have an email address. This sure
looks like bulk mail merge to me.
As the email appears to be one to one,
Have you gotten a copy too, or are you just idly speculating here?
though a remarkably persistent one to one, I would suggest procmail,
unless you know he�(TM)s harvested nanog and is sending the same
offer mail merged to a bunch of operators.
Gee, it's almost as if by posing a question to nanog@ like "Has anyone
else received spam from X", I might be trying to ascertain an answer
to precisely that question.
-r
Key data point: If the mail was being spammed to NANOG, I would have received that mail at this address, one of several that I use specifically for public mailing lists. The mail I did receive (multiple e-mail letters, by the way, some of them obvious form letters) came to my primary work address, which had been used in the past to contact that company to buy equipment.
So my answer to your precise question would be "no".
Having seen my share of pesky vendors - though not this one .. Yeah idle speculation it is. Informed idle I hope. 
--srs
As more and more "legitimate" companies exploit email as a free
resource I think we're going to need to broaden the definition of
spam.
Email is already on the verge of useless. And a lot of that is just
pitches from orgs one would, under old definitions, argue are not
spam.
So the question is whether spam, and we can quibble the word, only
email which is UBE or is it email which is rendering the technology
useless?
I think we've mistakenly via UBE definitions given out free licenses
to dump pollution in our drinking water.
If you don't think that's a problem right now that's ok I'll be back
in a year and two. I believe hearts and minds will change towards my
way of thinking about this, it's just a matter of pain threshold.
No, but I feel your pain. Two jokers have been trying since July to
recruit me as an Aflac salesman. Hear from them every few weeks.
-Bill
Absolutely not. The canonical -- and only correct -- definition
is UBE, as Suresh pointed out. It has served us well for decades
and it continues to do so.
HOWEVER -- there are other forms of abuse carried by SMTP and we have
names for some of those. If it turns out that yet one more form of
abuse is becoming a problem and thus we need a term to refer to it,
we can and should come up with one.
It's also worth noting that some instances of abuse can be described
by more than one term. Abusers, unfortunately, can be quite creative
and prolific.
---rsk
That prompts two questions: (a) How do you define "useless" and (b) what
do you advocate as a replacement?
(You want to stress-test your MUA, subscribe to the linux-kernel mailing
list, which runs anywhere from 700 to 1100 posts. Per day. And the list
is well-run, we see single-digits of spam per week.)