Sender: owner-online-news@marketplace.com
Precedence: bulk
Status: RO
X-Status: 

On 9/13/96, James Egelhof wrote:
>Amen.  Issues of spam should be dealt with by the mail client and by
>Congress and not by network providers receiving spam.
>
Just curious ... How might I fit into this as administrator of this list? 
I'd guess that 99.9% of online-news readers are happy that we've set up 
some (limited) spam barriers on this list. Given your logic, should I just 
open the gates and let all sorts of crap in and let y'all deal with it 
individually? 

With new list software (coming soon, I hope!), I'll be able to block out 
specific domains from posting to the list. Indeed, the latest generation 
list apps tout this as a worthy feature. (Existing controls for this list 
using Majordomo consist merely of limiting posts to active subscribers, 
which screens out most but not all spam. Blocking "pirate" domains is 
just another step.) 

Uncontrolled spam is a threat to the survival of this list; if unchecked, 
online-news would become an annoyance rather than a resource of value to 
its subscribers. It seems clear to me that I have every right to control 
it; this is not a "free speech" issue, but rather a matter of preventing 
unethical individuals or companies from damaging this online entity by 
ignoring the list's "rules" (TOS), and inappropriately consuming the list's 
resources (hogging processor cycles, which have a monetary cost).

I don't see much difference in the right I have to fight spams to this list 
to what AOL is doing. Would those who argue against AOL's action likewise 
suggest that I not fight spam here? (This is not to support AOL's specific 
action; I do think they handled it unwisely, and Panix's approach is far 
better in concept.)

(BTW, a while back I started filtering posts from the online-news Web site, 
which would allow a non-subscriber to post to the list. They go through me 
before being posted. I've been amazed at the number of spams I've caught. 
Indeed, 8 of 10 posts from the Web site have been spams. Anti-spam seems 
like a promising growth industry!)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Outing                                   Planetary News
steve@planetarynews.com                        Boulder, Colorado, USA
owner-online-newspapers@planetarynews.com      voice: 303-543-7810
owner-online-news@planetarynews.com            fax: 303-543-1059
        *Consulting services for the newspaper new media industry*                                      
                      http://www.planetarynews.com/
           Read my Stop The Presses! column on E&P Interactive:
------- http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stop/stop.htm -------


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

From owner-online-news@marketplace.com Fri Sep 13 22:16:40 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 WAA17766 ; for ; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 22:16:40 -0400
Received: (from majordom@localhost) by marketplace.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) id PAA29656 for online-news-outgoing; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 15:43:08 -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 PAA29651 for ; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 15:42:59 -0600
Received: from indra.com by server.indra.com (8.7.4/Spike-8-1.0)
	id PAA10555; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 15:27:44 -0600 (MDT)
Received: from nww.com by indra.com (8.7.4/Spike-8-1.0)
	id PAA02546; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 15:24:35 -0600 (MDT)
Received: from agaffin131.nww.com (internal131 [204.57.53.131]) by nww.com (8.7.1/8.7.1) with SMTP id RAA02508 for ; Fri, 13 Sep 1996 17:09:26 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199609132109.RAA02508@nww.com>
Comments: Authenticated sender is