On 3/1/2011 7:14 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
How well did the Usenet Death Penalty work against the invading aol, etc
hordes? Not very as I recall, and that was before the Big Bux were
involved that invariably grease the wheels.
_Every_ applied UDP worked and achieved its goals. Every single one.
I know. Not only was I there, I was a big part of implementing all of them.
It may not have looked in their press releases that those battles were
won - they had bigger PR departments than we did. We only cared about
results. And results we got.
Those were the days when ISPs were first introduced to the idea that
they needed to handle abuse. Heady days, worked with most of the
biggies throughout the period and helped them build abuse departments
where even the need didn't exist previously. Some of the people on this
list got their start from those efforts.
AOL was never seriously considered a UDP target. They were almost the
very first to see the need for abuse handling, and until recently set
the gold standard of excellence in it.
Sure, the AOLers were annoying. But its their spamming we cared about,
and their spamming got short shrift.
Over the years, some of them backslid. Some of them improved. And some
of them cycled between with horrifying rapidity. But without those
days, we'd probably be several years behind where we are in anti-spam.
OTOH, some might blame me for creating email spam. It was my chasing
Jef Slaton off Usenet that caused him to become the first significant
email spammer. Yup, all my fault. Oops. Sorry about that ;-)
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