Hey Eliot Lear,
NO NO NO and HELL NO. I despise Spam to the utmost degree and I regularly
refuse to buy items from people that advertise to me using Spam. On the
other hand I do not want someone telling me what I can and cannot receive in
my email or what I can and cannot send for that matter. I feel no need to
call my local congress man or woman over the contents of my inbox and really
hope that others do not as well because if we as a nation complain about
Spam enough and god forbid that we somehow get them to listen to us and do
something about it then we will be not only submitting to censorship and
oppression of things most of us agree are undesirable but also to the things
that the elite of the government find offensive. These things could include
anything that is counter to the mainstream religious beliefs and practices
and indeed anything that meets the least strict interpretation of
subversive. The censorship will not stop there indeed it will only grow
because by asking congress in one unanimous voice to censor our email we
will have admitted to the government that we are unable to handle the
information available to us on the internet and they will begin maneuvering
into a position to censor the information available to us on the internet as
well. The government already gathers information about what we look at and
what we put on the Internet let's not give them a reason or the ability to
take our right to know away from us. Instead I suggest we spend a little
more time and effort to developing new routines to filter out the Spam for
ourselves and boycotting the products and services whose providers choose to
use Spam to advertise to us.
Sincerely,
Doug
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eliot Lear" <lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
To: <perry(_at_)PIERMONT(_dot_)COM>
Cc: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Saturday, August 17, 2002 1:53 PM
Subject: writing congress about spam
The spammers are destroying the usefulness of enormous amounts of
wonderful infrastructure. Time for everyone to get on the phone with
their congressman and ask them if they are interested in what 98% of
the planet wants or what the Direct Marketing Association wants.
Ironically, if there is one body who has had to deal with large volumes
of unsolicited mail for a very long time, it is Congress. Indeed an
industry has been formed around it, because much of the mail must be
answered. From my experience, these answers are actually quite funny,
because they show very little relationship between the point I was
raising and the point that they choose to make in their so-called
response. Of course, commercial software folk must claim at some level
that my Congress person is just not using the latest and greatest.
Perhaps they need a variety of spam asssasin...
Eliot