From: "Peter Kay" <peter(_at_)titankey(_dot_)com>
...
is Internet email inherently trusted or is it untrusted?
Trust is gone, just as it evaporated from voice telephones a long time ago.
Is all email considered unsolicited until the recipient says otherwise?
Some kinds of mail has implicit consent. Almost everyone who has a
public mailbox welcomes or at least consents to non-bulk, inoffensive
mail. There is a good analogy between the calls you implicitly consent
to receive at a "published" (i.e. not "unlisted") telephone number
and the mail you implicitly consent to receive at an email address
that you have published in directories or divulged to individuals or
organizations.
The telephone calls that bother people are similar to mail spam.
...
Note that the Internet was in the hands of capitalists for
almost as many years before email spam became a problem as it
has been since spam became noticable.
Are you sure about that? When was commercial Internet use OK? When did
Canter & Siegel send the first spam? Maybe you mean "spam became
unbearable" instead of "noticable". 1 spam = noticable. 100 =
unbearable.
Canter&Siegal sent netnews or usenet spam long before email spam
became a problem.
Plenty of commercial use of the Internet was OK even in the 1980's,
as many of us worked for commercial outfits at the time can attest.
That was true not only of the baldly commercial parts of the net but
also on the NSFNET provided you could offer some kind of reasonable excuse
that whatever you were doing was "in support of research or education,"
even if you were making a profit at it or only selling goods or services
to other commercial outfits. I connected a UNIX vendor to the net
via CSNET using a leased line to facilities run by another computer
vendor in 1986.
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap1/net_hist.html says there were
1,000,000 hosts in 1992. I doubt they were all in the hands of
socialists or whatever are other than capitalists.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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