Hello: Thank you for your thoughtful reply. While I 'let go' of the turmoil, your message was such that a reply seemed appropriate. There is, alas, a 'method' to my 'madness' re: different email addresses and identities. My 'real' name is Barrett Culmback, and I am a retired professor of Philosophy and Eastern Religions, who has developed a 'geeky' interest in the internet and various 'lists,' reflecting my somewhat wide-ranging interests. Sorry for the confusion I have caused. I rarely post to any of the lists to which I am subscribed ... primarily interested in what others are thinking about the relevant subject-matter. Thank you, again, for taking the time to reply to my 'ambiguities.' Take care, Barrett -----Original Message----- From: LISTSERV list owners' forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Dennis Budd Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 6:18 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: warning: [log in to unmask] 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