[Air-l] conference request

[Mark Warschauer]

It seems to me that there are three distinct types of situations:

(1) Mass unsolicited emails for "legitimate" conferences (i.e., 
scholarly conferences associated with established professional 
associations)

(2) Mass unsolicited emails for fly-by-night for-profit conferences 
(i.e., the conferences themselves occur, but they are evidently run 
for commercial rather than scholarly purposes, often by mysterious 
groups with no apparent connection to established academic 
organizations)

(3) Mass unsolicited emails for non-existent conferences (i.e., pure 
scams in which the supposed conference does not even take place).

There's obviously a lot of grey area between the first and second 
categories.  And, as much as we might find objectionable about the 
second category, it's obviously very distinct from the third category.
Mark
-- 
Mark Warschauer
Associate Professor, Dept. of Education and Dept. of Informatics
University of California, Irvine
tel: (949) 824-2526,  fax: (949) 824-2965
markw at uci.edu; http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw