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