[10626] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
In the Matter of MCI Mail and lists addressed thereof...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (OUTGOING-MAIL@tdr.com)
Wed Mar 2 10:48:33 1994
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 1994 14:36:39 -0500 (EST)
From: OUTGOING-MAIL@tdr.com
Reply-To: OUTGOING-MAIL@tdr.com
To: Ethics in Software Engineering <ETHCSE-L@UTKVM1.BITNET>,
>From: OUTGOING-MAIL@TDR.COM>
Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA
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This is a general message dealing with the issue of mailing lists being
sent to MCI Mail. As I have a mailing list - and subscribers there too -
as well as being a subscriber of MCI Mail ("Tansin A. Darcos & Company"
<0005066432@MCIMAIL.COM> or TDARCOS@MCIMAIL.COM) so I know about the
problems there, I have an interest in this.
In fact, I had to move my private domain (TDR.COM) off of MCI Mail because
I could not read the headers and thus couldn't know to what address people
were sending mail.
In fact, I'll make this offer to any list that is having a problem with
its subscribers on MCI; I'll take all or any part of the MCI list that you
are having problems with for redirecting. I am currently working on
automated remailing of messages posted to my mailbox, so this should
encourage me to set it up to do so.
I am not subscibed to the UUNET moderators list, so please CC me with any
responses to this message.
Please feel free to post all or part of this message in any newsgroup or
mailing list or Digest. This is in response to lauren's message which I got
second hand from someone who mailed me a copy from MODERATORS@UUNET.UU.NET:
---------------
> Received: by vortex.com (Smail3.1.28.1 #7)
> id m0pb1vg-0001qdC; Sun, 27 Feb 94 22:58 PST
> Message-Id: <m0pb1vg-0001qdC@vortex.com>
> Date: Sun, 27 Feb 94 22:58 PST
> From: lauren@vortex.com (Lauren Weinstein)
> To: moderators@uunet.uu.net
> Subject: Warning to Internet moderators re: MCI Mail
>
> Hi. Any of you involved in sending articles, digests, etc. via
> SMTP to Internet addresses may be interested in the following.
>
> I've just pulled all the MCI Mail addresses (mcimail.com) off of the
> PRIVACY Forum distribution list, and have warned the affected
> users (and the MCI postmaster) of this action.
MCI has had this problem for years. MCI isn't making any money off the
distributions from Internet, and since people (like me) call in on an 800
number at no cost, it costs them money to provide them. There's no real
incentive to fix the problem since subscribers *are not charged* to
receive messages, only to send them. It has been reported that AT&T Mail
has decided to start charging for incoming mail from the Internet, roughly
2c/K.
> The MCI Mail gateway is causing two significant problems of which
> you might want to be aware:
>
> 1) On a mailing where one copy of the digest is being sent via SMTP to
> many addresses (the standard technique), if a SINGLE address is bad,
> the message will be delivered to NONE of the addresses. You get
> mail back telling you to "edit your envelope and try again".
I thought this behavior was supposed to be fixed last year. It may be
done to prevent crude "directory lookup" type routines via the Internet,
except that any subscriber can look up any MCI Mail addressee (except
unlisted addresses) via the "FIND" command. I agree, if it's still doing
this - which I thought had been fixed - then that is bad, very bad.
> 2) It appears that the gateway is inserting into the message (after the
> main header, which has your own official "To:" line, its own
> subscriber list, which consists of every name received by their SMTP
> server for that message. In other words, all subscribers who received
> that message are revealed to every other subscriber, in a nice long
> listing. This occurs regardless of what the actual "To:" line looks
> like--it's apparently a translation from the SMTP input stream.
Well, it depends on whether you like that form of activity; this is a
standard practice on MCI Mail, and I consider it a "feature" of the
service rather than a "bug". If you don't like it, it's going to be a
pain, I guess. I learned to live with it. You should see the IETF list;
it runs for 30 or 40 names.
> As a busy person trying to moderate a very large list, I find (1)
> above to be completely unreasonable.
Agreed; THAT should have been fixed.
> As the moderator of PRIVACY Forum, I find (2) to be completely
> intolerable.
All of the subscribers on MCI Mail know that their subscriptions are going
to be "compromised" to everyone else who subscribes to the list who is on
MCI Mail. I knew that three years ago when I took my first list and saw
the other subscriber names. If this is that critical, to be fair you will
also, I suspect, want to desubscribe AT&T Mail subscribers since I believe
that system also shows all recipients, but they may have changed this
since I was an AT&T Mail subscriber a couple of years ago and dropped the
service.
I believe it's only a problem if you expect privacy and then
discover you don't have it. Maybe I'm not so touchy on this as other
people. I could understand if some people were, say, subscribing to
alt.sex.homosexuality via a remailer and discovered they were being
broadcast to everyone (although anyone who posts on a list presumably
reads it) when they did not expect to be.
> I most certainly am not going to jump through hoops to send separate copies
> of each message to each subscriber to avoid these problems. No other
> gateways on the network that I know of behave in such a manner.
I know of about a half dozen sites which do echo duplicate subscribers, as
I've gotten the notes from people on MY list about other people's
addresses being visible to them. It is not an unusual practice.
Inappropriate, but not unusual.
---
Paul Robinson - Paul@TDR.COM
Voted "Largest Polluter of the (IETF) list" by Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
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