In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Sharon Tucci <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I'm a little late jumping on board here.
>
>At 11:31 PM 2/10/2000 -0800, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>
>>>** Sometime around 16:00 -0800 02/08/2000, Ronald F. Guilmette sent us:
>>>This is endemic of mailing lists and list owners, Ron, and has
>>>nothing to do with Topica, per se.
>>
>>That's bull.
>
>No, it's not. Our co. hosts/manages well over 1,000 lists for
>clients now. We tried for a short-time to require all new lists
>with us to reconfirm subscriptions. What happened was two things -
>first, list owners became very irritated - a small fraction of
>subscribers would confirm. A lot of them don't understand
>the process.
Gimme a break.
As has already been pointed out, the process of reconfirming can be
made even more trivially simple that just replying to a mail message...
you could include a URL in the reconfirm request that you send out,
and people could just click on (or visit) that URL to reconfirm.
(Ideally, users should be allowed to confirm _either_ by visiting the
URL _or_ via an e-mail reply, at their option.)
Anyone who cannot manage to _either_ visit a given URL _or_ send an
e-mail reply is not merely a moron, he is sub-human.
In any case, and regardless of the stupidity of YOUR user base, I don't
believe that you or your company are, or should be, exempt from reasonable
rules of net-conduct. Nor do I believe that you have a right to help
spammers to spam me just because doing so makes it slightly easier for
you and your company to accomodate those individuals among your user base
who happen to fall below Forrest Gump on the intelligence bell curve.
>Second, our sign-up rate for new customers dropped.
So what?
What you seem to be saying is that the normal and ordinary rules of
politeness and reasonableness that other people have been obeying for
years on the net don't apply to you, just because following the rules
of polite society might potentially cost you some money.
I cannot imagine a more self-serving argument.
>So we went back to what we did previously - require a new list
>owner to send a message out after the list was transferring giving
>the equivalent of "we've moved" message.
You _could_ just do what both John Levine and I suggested, i.e. spot
check all new lists that are transferred to your servers by sending
out a simple query to, say, 1% of all the addresses on the list.
The query would just ask people if they had signed up for the list
or not.
Oh! But that would require your company to do some actual work, so
I guess that's out of the question, right?
>We've received less than
>1 complaint for every 100,000 subscribers transferred to us.
That's one too many.
Besides, it is well known now that only about 1 out of every 1000 or
so spams actually generates a complaint... because people are so fed
up with complaining to companies (such as your's) that won't actually
DO anything about the problem... so your ``only one complaint'' claim
doesn't really impress me. How many people have been spammed by you
and yet did not complain about it?
>>OK smart ass. Simple question: If the spammer COULD HAVE just used his
>>own majordomo, then why didn't he? Why did he go to all of the trouble
>>to have Topica do his spamming for him?
>>
>>Maybe when you manage to puzzle that out, you will figure out why I have
>>blacklisted Topica locally.
>
>You may as well blacklist our servers and those of 99.9% of other
>list hosting services as well because it's likely we've all had one
>or more problem cases slip through the cracks.
Fine. I have no problem with doing that.
There really are only two kinds of people/companies on the net, i.e.
those that take a serious interest in behaving responsibly, and those
whose only goal is to maximize short term profits, even if they do so
at the expense of damaging the medium itself.
Spammers, Real Networks, your company, and many others seem to fall into
the latter category. I have no problems with blacklisting any domain
that puts its own short term profit motive above either my privacy or
my bandwidth.
>Unless you're dealing on a very small scale, it's impossible to
>have structure in place to avoid problems 100%.
See above.
This is a hollow argument as long as your company isn't even trying to
do _anything_ meaningful (e.g. spot checking, as described above) in
order to avoid problems.
I don't expect _any_ quality assurance process to be perfect. But I _do_
expect responsible companies to _have_ a quality assurance process.
How would you feel if (for example) Boeing said ``Well, a certain number
of wings on our aircraft are going to shear off no matter what we do,
so we've decided that it is really a pointless and unnecessary hassle
for us to perform any quality assurance testing on our aricraft wings
anymore. We have only had three crashes with fatalities in the last
five years, so its really no big deal.''
Responsible companies DO spend money on quality assurance. Which part
of this do you not understand?
>It may not even
>be the list hosting service itself, but the one the list owner
>was using previously. Case in point - we've had a number of
>lists transferred over to us from other services where the owner
>or employee at the other service gave the list owner an old
>version of their list (i.e.with people not removed who should
>have been and vice versa). End result? Spam complaints. Who is
>it at fault here?
You are, if you haven't bothered to fulfill YOUR responsibility to
do `due diligence' and if you haven't (at least) spot checked the
list before you spam it.
Maybe you need to have your legal department actually READ the text
of the recent California, Virginia, and Washington anti-spam laws.
As far as I know, these laws DO NOT make any exceptions for companies,
such as your's, that want to try to weasle out of their responsibility
for initiating e-mail messages. IF YOU send it, from YOUR SERVERS, that
makes it YOUR SPAM.
>Doing things like looking at a list owner's web site to make
>sure they have a legitimate business isn't always a sign.
Your right. It isn't.
Spot checking some small subset of the addresses on a newly imported
list is the ONLY sure fire way to figure our which list owners are
trying to dupe you into doing their spamming for them.
