[9555] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Unsolicited e-mail.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Phil Trubey)
Mon Jan 10 15:27:34 1994
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 1994 12:26:21 -0800
From: ptrubey@netcom.com (Phil Trubey)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Apologies if you see this message twice, I originally sent it via USENET
and I'm not sure if the gateway is bidirectional with com-priv.
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In article <9401062227.AA22518@tis.com> Stephen D Crocker <crocker@tis.com> writes:
>Hmmm... all of this is pretty interesting. I'm the area director for
>security in the IETF. Let me pose some questions for this group.
>
>The policy question: with respect to harvesting of names from Internet
>databases, finger, etc., if you could have the policy of your choice,
>what would it be?
I would have thought this issue would have raised more messages than it
has. Given the very good *other* tools on the Internet, I see no
reason why unsolicited ('junk') e-mail should be tolerated.
The mode of operation on the Internet has always been to have information
available for those that want to find it, or request it. If I want
general commercial messages, I can subscribe to the biz.* groups. If I
want specific info about a company's products, I can subscribe to their
mailing list. Things are even easier now with Gopher and WWW servers
out there. My opinion is that there is no intrinsic need for
unsolicited e-mail to exist.
Do people agree?
Now given that the Internet is an effective anarchy, there is no definitive
way of stopping the practice. However, if a respected body, such as
the Internet society, were to come out and say that it is a bad
thing to do, then this will go a long way to eliminating or at
least severely restricting its use.
BTW, I don't object to unsolicited e-mail on 'anti-commercialism' grounds.
I think commercialization of the Internet (ie. its use in commercial,
money making endevours, both from an operational and marketing sense)
in inevitable, and actually a good thing overall. What I am saying is
that unsolicted e-mail is simply a mis-use of e-mail technology. Just
because e-mail is similar to paper based mail, doesn't mean it is the same.
Just because non-electronic commerce makes use of paper based mail for
unsolicited advertising doesn't mean that it is a good use of the
technology to do the same thing in e-mail.
My reasons are that a) other alternatives work better (for both the
advertiser and potential customer) and b) unsolicited e-mail doesn't
scale. It doesn't take much imagination to see a future where we all
get 10 personally addressed junk e-mails a day - personally addressed so they
defeat mail filters. After deleting this many mail messages, you'll end
up slipping and deleting a very useful message from some person you
rarely correspond with - and you'll do this a few times a week.
The specific future scenarios don't matter too much - the point is that
e-mail wasn't meant for unsolicited use, and it doesn't work well
for that, and there are better alternatives anyways.
--
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Phil Trubey |
| Providing independent consulting in the
E-mail: ptrubey@netcom.com | application of Internet technology
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