William Chops Westfield wrote: > > The Internet's about empowering US, not empowering some twits to make > > money off us. Let's keep that in mind. > > If you DO keep that in mind, you have to be very careful about drawing the > dividing line in between the "twits" and "us." Most of your tirade would > not have applied to elab cause they didn't send out their message, however > annoying it and it's delivery methodology might have been, 2-10 times a day > to everyone, everywhere. Tirade? I thought those were rather Educational facts I posted - Correct my numbers if you find 'em wrong, but "You ain't seen a tirade from me, yet!" Unsolicited Bulk is Unsolicited Bulk. My example was just once a year, 1/4 of all co's - You saw the numbers that that implies, and you know that most reputable co's don't spam. And that most Spammers, "send bulk till their ISP's modem bleeds"... The consequences are pretty darn plain, methinks, of thinking "Spam is OK in any shape, way, or form." IMO, a twit's someone who sends me bulk, unsolicited e-mail, commercial or not; Many say far worse names I don't mind personal one-on-one non-bulk contacts at all; I don't enjoy having robots spew unsolicited e-mail at me, though. (Easy to tell the difference, too. I get unsolicited personal e-mail all the time - some pretty neat ones, too. Those offer me choices and ask questions.) IMO a large part of this is about CONSENT and ETHICS. I didn't give eLabs my consent, and they didn't send me a personal message, twas Bulk. If they learn and never do it again, Good! - Still, wasn't MY idea of fun. As for "cause they didn't send out their message" (themselves) - ? - /Tease ON/ I *HOPE* you aren't arguing that Charles Manson was a good guy as as he didn't kill many personally? /Tease OFF/ I don't think you want to argue (or are arguing!) that. (I'm not saying that Spamming's as bad as murder - There's no benefit to putting up with a behavior when the consequences were severe, though - so why allow it with merely annoying consequences? Honesty and ethics start with the LITTLE things, as anyone with kids learns, if you aren't honest with pennies then your teaching them about honesty won't fly. You wouldn't like it, if you have kids, if they stole quarters from you - why allow the same thing from a Spammer?) > > This'd QUITE effectively destroy e-mail as a *personal* communications > > medium, making it useless for all purposes > > It'd probably destroy the net as a whole, but it won't happen. The > technology exists NOW to stop it (or most of it, anyway) at the inbound > ISPs. Right now, everyone wants to get rich being an ISP, so there are many > ISPs that are a bit lax on restricting their customer's tendancies to abuse > the current properties of the net. In time, however, I think the world will > divide into ISPs that you can trust not to originate spam, and ISPs that > specically allow spam to be originated, and charge for the privilige (but no > one accepts mail from them, anyway.) IMO, Not so. You really cannot filter or block a new spam source, until it sends you SPAM - You can set consequences for SPAMming, though. The MAPS RBL blocks repeated SPAM sources, but cannot block someone who gets a new e-mail account and sends their crud through that new ISP - not instantly anyways. Education and tools such as the MAPS RBL that get ISP's to act faster and more effecively, can work to rid us of the few "bad apples" that do SPAM today. Tolerance for their abuse of the net, isn't going to do much more than keep the status quo - They'll act according to their nature, however messed up that nature IS. There are lots more hard-core people than I am; There're ISP's that refuse all e-mail from AOL, due to all the e-mail SPAM from there from free e-mail accounts - Still work to be done there, I imagine there's some internal heat there... I don't know if the MAPS RBL will EVER block AOL (some days I almost hope ) Part of the problem IMO is that there were originally no consequence for lax enforcement, until the MAPS RBL came along anyways - It works. > BillW Mark