Cc: "Dave Long" 
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Sender: owner-online-news@marketplace.com
Precedence: bulk
Status: RO
X-Status: 

With his spellchecker honed and ready, Donovan White  wrote:

>AOL's Dave Long  wrote:
>
>> An unsolicited email ties up switching resources, *and*
>> disk space for storage until the account holder downloads
>> or deletes it, as well as any connect charges and phone time
>> if you're accessing your mail over a modem.
>
>Considering that even the longest email chain letter occupies a minuscule
>number of bytes, I wouldn't shed many tears for hard drive cost or, in an
>era of 28.8 communications, of download costs. We are, for the moment,
>talking about ascii text, after all. All the above comes under the cost of
>doing business. 
>
        =Whose= cost of doing business? Why should transmitters and
recipients of email spam have to bear these costs at all, no matter how
minuscule?
        Does the notion of scalability not ring a bell? Should this logic be
applied to, say, roadside litter? ("A typical Big Mac wrapper weighs only
0.2 ounces and measures out at less than a square foot, and in an era of
wide highway shoulders ...")

>> In an ideal world, I'd rather have seen a policy that mail sent to
>> more than some large number of recipients (5000?) doesn't go through
>> unless on a mailing list (and therefore solicited).  

>(I'm assuming that it's recognized as patently ridiculous for the
>"unsolicited" aspect of an email to be used to characterize a message as
>undesirable, at least among those of us who marked the "Notify by email"
>box on the Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes certificate.)

        Wrong assumption, at least among those of us who didn't mark that
box, who throw away junk surface mail on sight and resent the waste of
resources that got it into their mailboxes, and who hang up angrily on
telephone solicitors?

>Large numbers are irrelevant when considering spam; the difference between
>Dave Long's unacceptable 5,000 and acceptable 4,999 is insignificant. And
>in a world of list servers and mail filters, widespread use makes a
>discussion of distribution and creation mechanisms moot. 

        Huh? Big listservs and majordomos do impose a substantial load on
the intervening systems, but they're serving a bilaterally useful end with
their operations: The needs and desires of both senders and recipients are
being met by their traffic. Commercial bulk email meets the needs and
desires only of the single sender while imposing the same load on the entire
infrastructure.

>That takes care of spam's attributes of automated creation, automated
>distribution, widespread distribution, and the lack of solicitation by the
>recipient.

        Nope.

>So that leaves content. And for an industry that almost
>unanimously opposes the CDA, it doesn't hold much water to then turn around
>and demand that carriers prevent the distribution of information based on
>the content of that information. 

        In fact, the positions on both issues are highly congruent. Adults
have the right to determine what they do and do not want to access and read.
But opposing the CDA doesn't mean I think anybody has the right to mail
pornography to me against my wishes.

        (1024x720 16-bit JPGs preferred.)

==========================================================================
Gordon T. Thompson                                      gordy@nytimes.com
Manager, Internet Services                              212 556 1386
The New York Times                                      fax: 212 556 1636
  The Times and I have an arrangement: Neither of us speaks for the other.

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
This message was posted to ONLINE-NEWS. http://www.planetarynews.com/o-n.html

From owner-online-news@marketplace.com Fri Sep 13 04:14:48 1996
Received: from marketplace.com (majordom@marketplace.com [206.168.5.232]) by cnj.digex.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id EAA10344 ; for ; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 04:14:47 -0400
Received: (from majordom@localhost) by marketplace.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) id XAA16839 for online-news-outgoing; Thu, 12 Sep 1996 23:45:27 -0600
Received: from server.indra.com (server.indra.com [204.144.142.2]) by marketplace.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id XAA16831 for ; Thu, 12 Sep 1996 23:45:22 -0600
Received: from indra.com by server.indra.com (8.7.4/Spike-8-1.0)
	id XAA04781; Thu, 12 Sep 1996 23:30:20 -0600 (MDT)
Received: from the-gimp.canuck.com by indra.com (8.7.4/Spike-8-1.0)
	id XAA01079; Thu, 12 Sep 1996 23:30:19 -0600 (MDT)
Received: from ccc001.canuck.com (ccc001.canuck.com [204.50.15.16]) by the-gimp.canuck.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id EAA24969 for ; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 04:36:11 GMT
Message-Id: <2.2.16.19960912232834.21bf5f0e@canuck.com>
X-Sender: andersen@canuck.com
X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Pro Version 2.2 (16)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: online-news@planetarynews.com