SPAM: “Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail” http://www.thefreedictionary.com/spammer

Since all email list postings are unsolicited, the defining feature of spam is hence *indiscriminate* (otherwise anyone who sends email — individual or multiple — is a spammer except if the message was solicited in advance).

I created in 1998 an email list (the American Scientist Open Access Forum) that is devoted to (what is now called) OA.
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

Indiscriminate posting to lists means postings that are off-topic. (I don’t think anyone has ever accused me of off-topic posting: My postings are all very tightly focused — some would say to a fault — on OA.)

I post to the AmSci OA Forum, and I often cross-post also to other OA Forums (the SPARC OA Forum and the BOAI Forum), sometimes also to the JISC Institutional Repository Forum, and, where relevant, to two library lists (serialst and liblicence) or, rarely, to a scientmetrics list (sigart).

Now if there is software that links SSP Kitchen blog voting to individuals’ email filters, so that blog postings that receive many anonymous SSP blog thumbs-down votes are filtered out of individuals’ email (which I rather doubt) then that is a bug in the blog software. I think Kent was probably right that the SSP blog spam filter is not for individual emails but for blog postings, and is based on a URL-count.

So the fact that JE is being deprived of email from me probably has nothing to do with the SSP blog filter for postings. An individual’s email software can filter incoming emails, a blog’s posting software can filter postings, and a blog’s email-alert software can filter individuals’ outgoing email alerts for postings to that blog, but they cannot influence other emails to and from individuals.

So I think JE was just trying to say that he feels that I am a “spammer” (and he has since managed to say that more directly in Zoe’s THE blog, together with a mysterious remark about courtesy)…

But I don’t post to express, discuss, or injure feelings. I am here interested in a point of logic: Is “spamming” now to be defined as the frequent, highly discriminating posting (often by way of critique or rebuttal to other postings) on substantive, on-topic points of logic and evidence that happen to be unwelcome to some individuals’ ears? Indeed, is that also the definition of “bullying”?