Re: Thinking outside the box

On 18 Mar 2013, at 14:19, Roger B.A. Klorese <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 3/18/13 6:51 AM, Ian Eiloart wrote:
>> 7. Currently, UK legislation includes a weak distinction between personal and business recipients. It's legal to send UME to business recipients - presumably there are businesses that like to be on the receiving end of B2B marketing. But which of these email addresses is a business address: "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]". I think it's uncontroversial that the first is business, the last is personal. However, the middle one is ambiguous (it's a personal local part, in a business domain). I'd like to see some infrastructure for expressing the concept. Or, a personal name in the local part makes it a personal address (but what about jobs@apple…?). Or, maybe the exemption should just be removed entirely. 
> 
> It's clear to me: every address at a business is a business address. Every domain is either business or personal. If businesses wish to control spam within their business domain, that's on them.

OK, but clarity of meaning can't be determined by consulting any individual. It requires a community to agree a meaning. And I disagree with you, so we don't have clarity.

I'll tell you why I disagree: At Sussex, we have lots of students with sussex.ac.uk email addresses. Students clearly are not business contacts, and nor are their email addresses. Student addresses constitute the majority of our email addresses, since they are a majority of the people here. Even among staff, we have a policy of not publishing "personal" email addresses like i.eiloart@… in our prospectus, for example. Instead, we use role based addresses like "admissions@…" and so on. That's because when a person leaves the University, their email address is retired. It isn't inherited by their successor. However, their successor will inherit the role based address. Similarly, if a person changes roles (as our administrators do), they'll take their personal address with them, but not their business role address.

The most common place that we'd see a personal address published would be in an academic paper. That's because academic queries relating to the paper would generally need to be answered by the author, not by the Univeristy: it's a question of academic independence.

-- 
Ian Eiloart
Postmaster, University of Sussex
+44 (0) 1273 87-3148