Hello fellow Listserv maintainers:

I happen to  live in the Philadelphia  area where Spamford lives.  There is a
weekly radio  talk show about  computers that airs on  one of the  local talk
stations here. I  forget the name of the  guy who hosts the show,  but he's a
senior editor with Information Week magazine.

On a recent broadcast of this show, r Spamford Wallace was on discussing this
new spam network.  Unfortunately, I missed that  part of the show  and I only
got to hear the last half an  hour of the show after Spamford's interview was
over.  The opinion  by the  host of  the show  and several  callers was  very
positive. One  caller raved  about how  easy it was  to deal  with Spamford's
company. This  caller said  he had Spamford  send out a  message to  sell his
how-to books.  As a result,  his book  sales climbed significantly.  The only
way to stop spamming activity of this  kind, if Spamford's plan does not work
as planned, is for spamming to be unprofitable.

Maybe this  opt out  provision will work  now that the  big spam  outfits are
cooporating with  one another, but only  time will tell. Apparantly,  we will
be able to go to a Web site and select which types of spam messages you want,
if any. For  example, if you're into  sports, you can enroll  to receive just
spam on that topic  ... at least that's what was claimed  on this radio show.

From the way the show's host was  talking, its in Spamford's best interest to
be as accurate as  possible in e-mailing people with his  spam because its so
easy for  the recipients  of spam  to delete  messages without  reading them.
From what I could gather, they really  don't want to waste people's time with
spam any more than  they want to waste their own  time sending such messages.
I hope that's  true. It certainly makes  sense. The success of  this plan, if
Spamford and his  cohorts really live up  to their word, depends  on how good
they  are at  getting all  the other  spamming agencies  to join  in on  this
registration plan.


  Stan  Horwitz  Internet: [log in to unmask]  Bitnet:  STAN@TEMPLEVM
  Temple University  -- Senior  Consultant (My  views are  all mine!)
  Manager of the Help-Net and Suggest lists and Listserv Postmaster.