At 04:07 PM 11/19/99 -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>At 8:48 AM -0500 11/18/99, Tom Neff wrote:
>> The number of spams received PER USER
>> are no higher than any other ISP or service, big or small.
>that's probably not true, but beyond that, it's a purely theoretical
>argument that I don't think holds water. it's like saying that
>there's no real difference to being in a room with one
>non-housebroken dog and 20. In theory, you're right. In practice, you
>can bet there is.
And if you were in a room with 20 non-housebroken dogs, the local animal
control people would call it animal neglect. You don't get 20 dogs unless
you have the room for them and can care for them.
AOL purports to run the world's biggest e-mail kennel. To put it bluntly,
they have to have enough pooper scoopers to do it right.
Come on, Chuq. I doubt that the number of spams received per user is an
order of magnitude higher or lower than the rest of the world. I just
checked their annual report on their home page. They claimed 13 million
members in July of 1998 with 5 million new members in fiscal 1999 (see
http://www.corp.aol.com/annual/facts/facts.html). That is about 18 million
members, give or take a couple million.
If the number bandied around here is, in fact, 18 million spams per day,
then, my reckoning is that it is an average of one spam per day per user.
If they can't handle one spam per day per user properly, then they are
grossly underconfigured. I think I get more than one spam per user per
day. They claim an average of 52 minutes per day per user....so that is
around 15 and a half million connect hours per day. At one point they
couldn't handle that either - and that was considered fraud. If, in fact,
this is a capacity issue (which I doubt) then they have oversold capacity.
Now I also read their UBE policy at http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.html.
Their UBE policy talks about syntax checking headers and so forth. Yep,
this is their right. However, they have implemented this in a way that
burdens people like us who run legitimate opt-in mailing lists. I think
that this is the issue. It is not a capacity issue, or a "real big job"
issue. It is a bad design issue.
>I find it fascinating to watch people tell other folks how easy it is
>to do their job right, myself. I wonder how many people on this list
>could begin to architect AOL's system, much less build one that
>didn't implode in the first three minutes.
I find it fascinating to hear you and others defend them for doing a job
that would be criminally fraudulent and neglegent if applied to any other
field, just because you think it is a hard job.
People are paying them to do this job. They are taking money for it. If
it is too hard to do, then they are taking money under false pretenses, eh?
It is their problem to figure out how to do it. It is their problem to
get enough servers and staff to do it, and to build a design that will do
it. The reality is that they have apparrently picked a bad design and are
spending an enormous amount of effort making it work as designed (broken as
designed). This goes back to my original statement: AOL's mail system was
designed by an idiot studying to be a moron or else they would not have
made this bad choice. If this was a choice forced on the person with the
"designer" title by management, then management is the designer.
Let's see, how about reducing your defense to the absurdity that it is:
You take your car to the dealer to be fixed. They promise to call you when
it is done. You go back a week later after not hearing from them and find
that there is no trace of your car. Then you hear second hand that the
dealer had too many cars to repair and that their policy is to use some
secret selection criteria to pick some random number of cars to be crushed
when they have too many, based on whether they think you will be happy with
the repair when it is done, or whether the service writer correctly
filledout the repair order.
You deliver your dog to an airline to be shipped to your aunt in Peoria
while you take a "round the world" vacation. Your aunt never gets the dog.
You try and put tracers on the dog but no one ever calls you back. Then
you hear that the airline applies a secret criteria to determine that your
aunt probably never wanted to take care of the dog so they euthanized it
and cremated it without telling anyone.
You are in a mail order business. Every day, you drop a large number of
packages off with UPS. UPS uses a secret criteria to pick 33% of your
shipments and incinerate them because they have something technically wrong
with the label, even though a valid return address is written on the box.
When you question them about it, they never answer, but you hear, third
hand, that they do this to millions of packages a day, and that they can't
spare the staff to call you up and tell you about it, because. Calls to
UPS to try and trace lost packages are ignored because they deal with way
too many per day to be bothered tracking any particular one.
And in every case, when you dig around, you find that the fine print in
their contract lets them do this.
I'll be frank: Someone should write this up for one of the many rags that
circulate. If it hit one of the major newspaper syndicates, maybe they
would fix it, and not make it our problem as list owners.
--
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
That which does kill us makes us smell stronger, after a few days, anyway.
Nick Simicich mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] or (last choice)
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html -- Stop by and Light Up The World!
