A recent piece of unsolicited email, promoting a Brazilian retailer called Chic Mix, carries the following interesting message (loosely translated from the Portuguese):

Anti-Spam Policy: if you don't want to continue receiving news from Chic Mix, please click here

If you spotted that the words 'anti-spam policy' don't really belong there, give yourself a small prize. Whatever that message is, it's not a 'policy'.

But perhaps I'm reading it wrong. Perhaps it's a shorthand way of saying "(We have an) anti-spam policy". But that's wrong too. Implicitly, the policy followed by Chic Mix or whoever is sending ads in their name is to send unsolicited mail until you ask them to stop. That may be a policy, but it's certainly not an anti-spam policy. It could better be described as a spam policy.

The mental disconnect happening here seems to be fairly widespread. I received an anguished message earlier this week from a Peruvian bulkmail company which read "we are not spammers - why have you listed us?". The message contains a graphic identifying the sender (a popular trick for avoiding filters) and including the text:

This mail has been sent by ... following all the requirements of Law 28493 which regulates the sending of unsolicited email. If you want to ask to be removed from our database, please send a message ...

Last I looked, Peruvian law didn't carry much weight where I live. But that's a detail. What's at issue is that the sender's reasoning can be summed up as "We are following the law, therefore we are not spammers.". This is the way of thinking gives rise to the "... this message cannot be considered spam ..." bullshit you see on many pieces of UCE, usually accompanied by a Murk.

But that reasoning is invalid. The title of the Peruvian law is "Law that regulates the use of unsolicited commercial email (spam)". Like the US CAN-SPAM Act and other permissive spam laws, the text of the law does not define 'spam'. Instead, it lays out when spam is and isn't illegal.

So the policy of this particular bulkmailer can be summed up as "We will send you unsolicited commercial email, but we won't break the (local) law when we do so." Once again, that's not an anti-spam policy: that's a spam policy.