On Tue, 24 May 1994 12:12:44 -0400 Murph said:
>...
>If nothing else, Carter & Siegel should do wonders for L-SOFT's business as
>I don't think competing list distribution software makes it nearly so easy
>to filter these turkeys out.
 
   One other interesting sidelight.  After the recent "one line" message
that was sent to about 273 lists, I was concerned because a couple people
replied and the reply not only went to the list they received the mail on,
it went to all 272 of the other lists too!
 
   At first I thought maybe Pine was including X-To: and X-Cc: (or even
Comment:) tags in it's reply if you answered "Yes" to the query about
whether or not to include all the addresses.
 
   But it turns out that at least one of those folks was apparently on
info-prograph which apparently runs on other software.  I suspect it just
left all those raw To:/Cc: entries in there for the replying!  So mark
another one up to automated list management!  ;-)
 
>
>I notice that the draft Acceptable Use Policy Definition (mentioned earlier
>on this forum) makes no mention of advertising (or of chain mail for that
>matter).  I suppose we'll have to get to that.
 
   Oh no... I started answering this and what follows is a meandering
stream of thoughts (well - words anyway) that turned out to be a lot
longer than I intended...   Uff da...  (you are forewarned...)
 
   Hmmm - hasn't the argument about "lost access" caused by trojan horses
and other network pollution been used in the past?  I've tried to think of
analogies in other parts of life but most are not that great.  We all get
unsolicited junk mail and unsolicited phone calls - ESPECIALLY if we are
on mailing lists or membership lists.  Of course while we think we don't
pay for those we probably do in various indirect ways even though their
model is sender based charging.  But on computer networks very often the
costs (and please don't call them free!) are RECEIVER based.  We pay for
processing costs to read the mail, store the mail (in transit even if we
discard it), etc.  That is all in addition to the indirect "time wasted"
sorts of personal costs with any of those scenarios (and I'd rather get
the unsolicited message vie e-mail than the telephone! ;-).
 
   Now - PLEASE understand - I am NOT defending the two "NON-periclean"
(I looked it up - periclean refers to the great intellectual stuff...;-)
lawyers (nor lawyers in general).  But I think folks from outside the net
might wonder about us if we get too carried away on this desecration of
the net.  ;-)  Let's think about why this is bad and maybe there would
be better ways to combat it...
 
   So, just what is it that made me so upset when I saw the very first
message?  Heck, I probably only got half a dozen copies, each with one
line of text.  Of course they did have 135 lines of X- headers which
was sort of a dead give-away.   But I get a lot less junk e-mail that
way than I do junk surface/snail mail?  Don't kid yourselves - distribution
lists are the name of the game in both cases.
 
   We can say "the message doesn't fit the topic of the list" but we all
know there are lots of other messages which wander from the topic of a
list.  There are innocent inquiries that get to the wrong list.
 
   But two things are different: The obvious intent is there to
disregard the topic of the list AND as "proof" of that the message is
sent to many different lists.  I am Presbyterian and we have a reputation
for doing things "decently and in good order" (something like that) but
I know a lot of the rest of you who are upset can't use that excuse! ;-)
 
   I've never gotten too involved with studying the sociology of e-mail
but it seems there is definitely something different going on than what
happens with normal surface mail.  Maybe more "ownership" of our e-mail
"space" or sort of a "protectionist" attitude.  Is it because it is
more "interactive"?  Are we jealous that the perpetrator thought those
other lists would be anywhere near as good as ours?  ;-)
 
   One other detail:  What if all our lists had been set to X-tags= No
so we basically just got a one line message.  Would we have reacted the
same way?  I don't think I would have - even after getting a few of these
on various lists and maybe sending a note back to the sender, I think that
long list of other lists made the message obviously non-personal...
wouldn't even have seen the other lists involved
 
   Now I'm not advocating X-tags= No (but the proper setting of that might
be an interesting discussion in its own right) but should we be able to
block mail to a list if it has more than n recipients (I suggested
this be both a global variable as a default with list by list optional
override)?  I know some past cases have NOT sent mail to a long list of
addresses (the Green Card thing may have been done that way) but at least
it removes one easy way to splatter lots of lists.
 
>
>Who's the provider that's willing to connect pericles.com to the Internet
>for the purpose of sending junkmail?
 
   Well, that is an interesting question.  The Internic whois database shows
the network 199.98.145.0 (pericles.com A is 199.98.145.1) is assigned to
PSI (Performance Systems International).  The long string of MX handlers
is also in the PSI.COM zone (they'll probably need them!) so maybe this is
some sort of intermittent connection.
 
   But I don't know (I haven't been following all the press on this) if
PSI made any sort of stipulation on their use or not.
 
>
>/s Murphy A. Sewall <[log in to unmask]
>   Professor of Marketing                          (203) 486-5246 fax
>
 
   Oh heck - after writing all that I feel guilty about not getting through
all the bounces waiting for me on the postmaster account.  ;-)
 
                 marty