That's odd.  I just checked http://north.pole.org/ and it said they are
NOT trying to collect as much mail as possible, and that [log in to unmask]
already has a lot of mail to deal with :)
-nate
>Posted on 14 Dec 1994 at 22:07:24 by David W. Baker
>
>Re: (Fwd) *hungry for the holiday spirit*
>
>Date:         Wed, 14 Dec 1994 15:21:06 GMT
>Reply-To:     LISTSERV list owners' forum <[log in to unmask]>
>From:         "David W. Baker" <[log in to unmask]>
>Organization: Brown University
>
>In article <[log in to unmask]>, LISTSERV list
>owners' forum <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>     Has anyone else seen this? Is it legitimate? I refuse to pass it on to my
>> list if it is indeed a scam to collect email addresses for a later spam. (I
>> realize that I am not showing the true holiday spirit, but I worry about the
>> use of the net for other purposes...).
>
>   Someone forwarded that message to a list I am subscribed to. This was
>my response questioning the validity of the message, and how there is a
>valid charity donation initiative via the WWW:
>
>
>
>        Is this a joke? I mean, really, what would stop a "well
>intentioned" user from writing a very simple job that mailed those sites
>automatically throughout the Christmas season. If you check
>http://north.pole.org/ the agreement says the following:
>
>1.) Various corportations "sponsor" a particular charity for this site
>2.) When someone visits the page of this sponsored charity on
>north.pole.org, the sponsor donates $.10 to that charity
>
>        While certainly someone could write a program to hit these pages
>automatically a gazzillion times, the below system of sending e-mail seems
>much more likely to get out of hand. Is there a source from Sun which
>confirms this?
>        Organizations paritipating the the WWW page initiative are Sun
>(sponsoring a page on Second Harvest Food Bank), Friedman, Billings,
>Ramsey & Co, Inc. (sponsoring the Chesapeak Wildlife Heritage), Ex
>Machina, Inc. (sponsoring the Harlem Educationsal Activities Fund, Inc.),
>and Bay Networks (sponsoring Plugged In).
>        (Just worried that this might result in the site being
>horrendously mailbombed with no benefit.)
>
>David