On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, rbnwic rbcnwmicr wrote:

>I am rbnwic8.  I subscribed to lists in which I am interested ... no
>spamming or spoofing.  I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy/Religious Studies from a
>'major' university and am a full professor at one.  Please take my
>subscriptions seriously.

OK.

You are subscribed to one of my lists under another address of yours.
The list in question is subscription by owner, and in response to the
subscription request you made in October I sent you a copy of the list
guidelines.  Your reply back was short and concise, but it indicated
that 1) you had read the guidelines and 2) you had personal experience
with the subject matter of the list.  I added you as a subscriber.

About a week later I received a subscription request from the address
you are using on this list.  Since you had used "Cyberguru8" as the
name for your first subscription request it looked like it was the
same person.  Before I had a chance to reply I learned from the site
list owners' list that the address you had sent to me for your first
subscription request, the one I had added you under, had been
subscribed to more than 50 lists on the site, and that people were
very wary as a result.  I felt uneasy about it as well, but I decided
that since you had replied personally to me giving me the information
I had needed to add you to the list, I would leave intact the
subscription that you already had to the list and would ignore your
second subscription request.  As far as I was concerned, you didn't
need to be subbed under two different addresses.

Now this.

Today I received two more subscription requests from you, even though
you are still subbed to the list under the address you originally
requested.  I posted my suspicions to the site list owners' list, and
quickly learned that once again you had subscribed to more than 50
lists under the first of those two addresses.  Then came the spate of
postings on LSTOWN-L, this list, to which you are also apparently
subscribed.

What little personal info you've posted to this list is consistent
enough with what you shared in your original reply to me before I
added you to my list to calm some of the apprehension I've had about
you.  The judgment from where I sit is that you are in fact authentic,
which is a relief to me as the list of mine that you are on is in
major part a personal sharing list.

So I will once again leave your current subscription intact, and I
will once again ignore the two subscription requests you sent me
today.  It may have been a result of your trying to resubscribe to all
the lists you were deleted from on the site, but as far as I'm
concerned you don't need four different subscriptions to the same
list.

Having stated my own personal decisions however, I need to follow up
on things that make people uneasy:

How can anyone possibly read all the mail from hundreds of lists each
day?  I'm not willing to dismiss out of hand your statement that you
do, but then again I can't imagine how.  At the very least, this
raises questions in peoples' minds.

You use multiple accounts and multiple changing names for your
subscriptions.  While this does not necessarily mean any bogus intent
on your part, it raises red flags all over the place because of the
way that many people who abuse the net hide their identity.

The names and e-mail addresses that you have used to try to subscribe
to my list are:

Cyberguru8          <[log in to unmask]>

Robert Johnston     <[log in to unmask]>

Rbnwic Rbcnwmicr    <[log in to unmask]>

Edwin Markham       <[log in to unmask]>

Many people use names other than their own in the From: address of
posts and in their mailing list subscription names, but the majority
of these people will use their real name somewhere in the body of
their post and are making no attempt to hide their identity.

Now you have identified yourself as Barrett Culmback in the body of
your latest posts.  Given the plethora of "identities" that you've
assumed, I don't know whether that is your real name, which is what I
would normally take it as, or whether it is simply another alias.

Since on my list I don't require people to disclose their real names,
not even to me, this is not an issue for me personally as long as I
feel you're authentic.

On the other hand, your various "identities" raised some doubt in me
as to whether you in fact were who you said you were.  I went with the
judgment that told me I needed to honor what you had written me about
yourself, and now I feel more comfortable with that judgment.

But I expect it to be a big issue for many others...to wit, who are
you?  Not knowing who they are communicating with makes a lot of
people feel uncomfortable.

You may not like all the uneasiness with your list subscriptions, but
I'm think it's a reasonable response to these issues that raise
questions in peoples' minds, whatever the real answers to the
questions are in your particular case.

I think that's all I have to say.

Dennis