From: John Glube
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 3:43 PM
John,
I have to leave for the weekend, but in summary to your main points, I have
to point out that the Internet was not created as a marketing medium for
commercial enterprises and it does not have to be altered to insure a profit
for them. If such commercial enterprises don't like the way that the user
community has responded to the theft of their purchased bandwidth by
irresponsible marketers, I really am not concerned. Like it or not, the
responsible bulk mailers _are_ being lumped in with the
spammers/scammers/criminals because that is the preponderance of what people
see in their inboxes. I do not have any responsibility to help insure that
any company, regardless of their personal behavior, can make a profit via
email marketing. I also don't feel the need to put in place a system that
guarantees delivery of bulk mail as long as senders follow certain
guidelines. That is not my problem.
An excess of UBE is my problem, and I no longer expect or care if the
business community decides to help or even cooperate. The user community
has developed solutions that work and we will continue to use them.
Business efforts such as the one that you linked to are far too late and are
seen as irrelevant by many. Grass-roots rebellions are hard to suppress,
and that's what the email marketers are now dealing with. As you pointed
out, the non-profit blacklists are not commercial entities and cannot be
held liable for what other people do with data that they make available for
free with no representations as to the accuracy of that data. Some of them
even explicitly say not to use their lists to block email. That is the
system operators decision. Do you want to sue every system owner that uses
a blacklist service? Be my guest. When email marketers as a whole start
acting responsibly, I suspect there will not be any significant problem.
Until the day comes when someone passes a law saying that I have to accept
and pay for every message that hits my MTA, we'll just keep blocking their
trash. If a few pieces of solicited bulk mail get blocked, that's of far
less concern to most users than the avalanche of junk they are now faced
with. You may wish that most users cared greatly about solicited bulk mail,
but they generally do not. However, _everyone_ cares about spam.
--
Seth Goodman