[12745] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Stopping spamvertising: will more de-centralization work?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Wilson)
Fri May 27 20:20:46 1994
Date: Fri, 27 May 1994 02:06:52 -0500
From: deejay@netcom.com (Jack Wilson)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Stopping spamvertising: will more de-centralization work?
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Recently USENET has come under attack by mass marketers, or
"spamvertisers". As more and more marketers discover how easy it is to
blanket all of USENET with their messages, you can expect this problem to
get worse.
Even though this is a problem, I read many publicly accessible
"newsgroups" which the mass marketers have never discovered. I'm speaking
of mailing lists such as COM-PRIV, of course.
Many people dislike mailing lists. From the user perspective, mailing
lists, especially high-traffic ones, are a real chore to read. Even if
the user has a filter installed which automatically places mailing list
traffic in the appropriate mailbox, going through the mailbox for a mailing
list, posting replies, etc. is inconvenient compared to reading news.
From the system administrator's perspective, especially administrators
of large systems, mailing lists are undesirable. If 50 people on a system
are subscribed to a mailing list, 50 copies of each letter on the mailing
list will go to that system, which makes a mailing list seem very bandwidth-
intensive compared to a newsgroup.
But mailing lists have advantages: Inherently, all mailing lists are
moderated, even though they are by default open to anyone who wishes to post
to them (You can expect mailing list software to get a great deal more
sophisticated, enabling the moderator to filter by user, by topic, or by
message content); and starting up a new mailing list is as simple as
requesting a mail alias from your site administrator.
Many people want newsgroups to be more like mailing lists. But I suggest
that mailing lists should behave more like newsgroups. In particular:
* BETTER USER INTERFACES. Newsreaders should be able to read through a
mailing list mailbox just as if it were a newsgroup, with all the
functionality that users would expect: threads, killfiles, etc.
* LESS BANDWIDTH USAGE. Instead of mailing a copy of a letter to every
subscriber on a system, mail one copy of the letter, SMTP-cc'd to every
subscriber. SMTP (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't support such a
feature; it needs to be extended to support this, and mailing list
management software should take advantage of it. (Note that for
obvious reasons, an SMTP-cc feature should only cc messages to
users on the system...)
* LESS RESOURCE USAGE. Sites with an extremely large number of users
might look into simply subscribing to various mailing lists on behalf
of their user community, and then forwarding the mail traffic to
the news spool.
I've asked around about these various features and it seems as if many of
them already exist, or are in the works, but have been developed
independently of each other. Those who want to try to put an end to
spamvertising and other undesirable net practices should consider how these
components might fit together to form a system which would be the same as
USENET from the user's viewpoint, but fundamentally more robust.
-- Jack Wilson, deejay@netcom.com
