On Fri, 9 May 1997, David Maltz wrote:

> AOL is doing a good job at mail you probaly made the mistakes yourselves.

  Well, David, I'm going to take a chance and guess that you are a
reasonable character.  So, maybe from your perspective you think that
AOL is doing a good job for *you*.  But, I can tell you from frist hand
experience that there are other subscribers to AOL who do not share your
opinion because I have talked to them.  Some of these are people from
AOL who subscribe to our mailing lists, and suddenly, they found their
mail just stopped coming in.  They had no idea that AOL was preventing
legitimate mail from reaching them.

  If you have been following this "thread", you should also know that AOL
doesn't care about them, or you as an individual, because as Brad said,
with 8 million customers, it won't hurt AOL at all if they leave and go to
another ISP.  As he put it, this is how the big boys play the game.  The
really sad story for you in all of this, is that you will never know if
*you* are one of those effected because AOL will not tell you if
legitimate mail for you was refused.  And remember, it is not "us" that is
violating an internet standard in this case.

  If I were a different kind of person, which I am not, I'd ask my fellow
Listserv Postmasters to make use of the FILTER_ALSO in listserv's config
file, with a nice "blurb" to all AOL subscribers, saying that they are
welcome from another ISP, but I'm not that kind of person.  We will
survive and this particular incidence will disappear and perhaps be
quoted in years to come, if only to draw attention to when this list
suddenly heard a heated debate again.   I could say more, but
arguments of "fairness", "cooporation", and "remember what the net used
to be like" are lost in the late 1990s.... maybe we will get it back
with Internet II. :-)

  As an aside, thanks Harry for the phone numbers.... nice to see you
are still around and kicking. And Landy, wow! is all I can say.

--Trish

---------
Trish Forrest
ITS - Queen's University