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Message: [QUOTE="Steven D'Aprano, post: 4033251"] Not quite. I've read tens of thousands of messages to comp.lang.python, and solicited perhaps some hundreds. Are all the rest spam? I should say not! I haven't solicited them: at no point did I say, explicitly or implicitly, "Hey strangers all over the world, send me messages asking questions about Python" but I do welcome them. (In fact, I'd be annoyed if everyone started sending the questions to me personally instead of to the list.) I think it is foolish to try to create a water-tight definition of "spam". It is clearly a fuzzy concept, which means sometimes right- thinking people can have legitimate disagreements as to whether or not something is "spam". For example, I happen to think that the OP's message about Fascism is off- topic but not spam. I think Joan is guilty of a breach of etiquette for failing to label it [OT] in the subject line, and she should have directed replies to a more appropriate forum (a mailing list, another newsgroup, a web forum, anywhere but here). But in my opinion, it didn't cross the line into spam. I wouldn't be the slightest bit tempted to killfile her, or flag the message as spam, in my mail/news client. If other people feel differently, well, that's your personal choice. But please don't try to tell me that *my* line between spam and ham is wrong, and that *yours* is the only correct one. (That last response is aimed at a generic You, not Ben specifically. Stupid English language, why can't we have a word for generic you?) [/QUOTE]

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