On 22 Mar 00, at 9:47, Roland Zuk wrote:

> Unlike Francoise, I'm more than just a bit miffed, and I hope his view
> does not represent LSoft's official position.

You start out talking about me, but then you refer to "his view" and
I'm not clear whose view it is that you are referring to. If that's me,
my husband will be very upset to find out I've had a sex change.

> It appears Remarq.com
> has gone out and harvested our List names and descriptions, and added
> them to their "service".  They somehow procured my list information,
> even though it has been Confidential=Yes for over three years.  It
> would seem there's more going on here than just pillaging public LSoft
> Catalist directories.

According to their rep, they got it from PAML. Is your list in PAML?

BTW, when we catch people abusing Catalist in this way, we put a
stop to it. The webclipping.com people that I warned LSTSRV-L
about is one example that we recently caught and stopped and
they were most unrepentent -- their attitude was "it's ok, we weren't
planning on spamming these lists".

But now that I think of it, I should probably have warned
LSTOWN-L as well. Pardon me while I take a quick detour.

    You may want to do:
    SCAN listname webclipping
    for your lists (or Q * FOR *@*webclipping.com if you have many
    lists)

    Go take a look at http://webclipping.com and think about what
    use they might have for subscribing to your list, and whether
    you want to permit that.

    If the answer is "no", the filter line for your list header is:
    Filter=Also,*@*.webclipping.com,*@webclipping.com
    (If you have other Filter lines, only the first one should have
    the "Also,").

I'm sorry that my previous email gave the impression that I (or
worse, we) don't take this seriously. I spent considerable time
looking into it and was reporting what I'd discovered so far, which
was that it looked like a mail redistribution service and one that
didn't even work correctly at that. I was expressing relief that it
wasn't as bad as it could have been, but I did not mean that it
wasn't worth bothering about.

I was out of the office the last couple of days on a family
emergency and have not been able to get back to looking at it
further but it was not my intention to just leave it at that. It _did_
occur to me that they might someday fix those scripts, and I do
want to find out what I can do on my end to prevent them from
working even when they fix them on their end. I did find it rather
amusing that they are not even any good at being pirates.

> > Even if it worked, it seems like it's more along the
> > lines of a hotmail.com address -- an anonymizer rather than an
> > archiver.
>
> Again, please help ease concerns by explaining the basis and facts
> supporting your statement.

Yup, they're keeping a copy of your list email, but so are your
subscribers, and so's Hotmail, when you have subscribers using
Hotmail. In _that_ sense, it's not much different from Hotmail and
any of the other free email services. You trust Hotmail not to make
the list email public, and Remarq is hoping that you trust them the
same way.

From what I saw, including what Michael Johnson sent to the list,
it appears that the intent of the Remarq service, insofar as lists are
concerned, is to provide a web-based e-mail service, much like
Hotmail.com. You sign on to Remarq, you ask to subscribe to the
list and they send the command to subscribe a unique address to
the list and and when they receive mail from that list they put it in
your email account. And that's essentially what Hotmail and others
do, except that these others don't provide a special wrapper for
working with lists.

Really, the more I find out about Remarq, the more I think they are
just plain incompetent rather than unethical. It looks like they
decided to make a web-based email service with a little something
extra: making it easy to subscribe to a mailing list without having
to concern yourself with the syntaxes of the different mailing list
management programs. In concept, it's not a dreadful idea.

But clearly, they did not put any thought into all the ramifications,
and the implementation is appalling. The subscribers have no idea
what email address they're subscribing under (or would be
subscribed under if it actually worked), turning it into an
administration nightmare for list owners. They hide not only the
nasty syntax, but all that nasty information that the list owners
have provided about their lists -- I don't know, that part is hard for
me to stomach: they have to be pretty oblivious not to realize how
unethical _that_ is.

Anyway, has anyone gotten results from sending mail to
[log in to unmask]  and asking them to stop providing an
interface to their lists? I would do it myself, but I want to keep my
list there long enough to figure out what to filter on.

Francoise