In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Daniel Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>) Of course, if we are talking about the monkeys.com domain (total of 1 user)
>) nobody gives a damn. However if AOL decided to do this, or Hotmail, then
>) I think that you would find a lot of list admins getting with the program.
>I think that's disgusting. That's almost sorta kinda like "if you want to
>sell one computer with Windows, you have to sell them all with Windows,"
>except in this case it's not so "bad."
There's a big difference.
In one case, the goal is just to make Bill Gates richer than he already is.
In the case of what I proposed however, the goal is to rid the Internet of
bulk E-mail spam while leaving all of the *legitimate* mailing lists still
standing.
>) >... and that would be wrong.
>) OK. I'll bite. Why?
>)
>) Are mailing list administrators like minor dieties or something?
>Taken in context, absolutely!
>I run over 60 mailing lists on narnia, and I'll be damned before I let
>some half-twit (either at monkeys.com or aol.com) tell me I have to have
>my mailing lists added to some list before their users will be able to
>participate.
Hummm... Fiesty, aren't we?
>The correct answer to "I can't subscribe to your mailing list because my
>ISP has some blocking thing setup" is "get a decent ISP."
That's swell, except for it doesn't do anything to cutrail the bulk E-mail
spam problem.
Are you pro-spam?
OK, OK. It's a retorical question, but you get my drift. Bulk E-mail
spam has changed the nature of the net forever and there is no going back.
*Somebody* is going to have to make some small sacrafices in order for
us to get rid of this crap, and it may (unfortunately) end up being the
owners and operators of legitimate mailing lists.
Look, the one distinguishing, unmistakable, unambiguous, and consistant
characteristic of all bulk E-mail spam is *bulk*. So obviously, that is
the distinguishing characteristic that we need to use if we have any hopes
of killing it all via fully automated means. This should not be hard to
do. If you are a receiving site, and if you see ``bulk'' coming in, you
just kill it. Technically, that is a piece of cake to do. The problem
is that innumerable _legitimate_ mailing lists operate on the basis of
bulk mailing also. So there has to be some way to let them in, while
keeping the spammers out. So how can we do that? We *cannot* get all
of the spammers to do anything special to distinguish *their* mailings
from those of legitimate opt-in mailing lists, so we may just end up
having to ask the owners and operators of all legitimate mailing lists
to do some really minor amount of work in order to distinguish themselves
as being legitimate... preferebly in an unforgable way (such as what I
described).
You may not like it but that may be the future.
You may not like it, but this may perhaps be the _only_ complete solution
to the E-mail spam problem.
I mean geeezzzz... It isn't as if I was telling you that you were going to
have to pay money in order to continue to run your legitimate lists! That
_ain't_ what I was proposing.
>)Is there
>) something wrong with asking them to do their part to help end sbulk E-mail
>) spam on the Internet??
>I find that emailing the full message and full headers to
>abuse@THEIRDIRECTUPSTREAMPROVIDER usually works absolutely wonderfully.
>Even AGIS responds to my messages [sometimes].
That's swell, except that there are many others who don't respond in any
meaningful way. Compuserve is one. UUnet is another. AT&T is another.
Shall I go on? (I have a rather long list.)
-- Ron Guilmette, Roseville, California ---------- E-Scrub Technologies, Inc.
-- Deadbolt(tm) Personal E-Mail Filter demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/deadbolt/
-- Wpoison (web harvester poisoning) - demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/
