I highly resent your interest in having your customers steal my resources
to advertise at just about no cost to themselves.
One 2k email doesn't cost anyone didley, but add up the bandwidth total
for all the spam sent and then add the bandwidth wasted tracking down the
offenders and any actions taken against them and you have a pretty piece
of change as well as some impact on the rest of the legitimate packets
going out and about.
You can be assured that we'll put your entire zone in our smtp filters
if I see even one piece of spam from your domains. Every anti-spam zealot
haven will also get a copy of the spam and your statements below.
I added three more spammer domains to the filter list today, yours was
almost number four.
I apologize to list members for the rant, but I'm approaching the
zero-tolerance level with these net-thieves.
Now, does anyone talk about Portmasters in here anymore? :)
J. Henry Priebe Jr. Blue Moon President & Network Administrator
X2 & K56flex Access net.bluemoon.net - Blue Moon Online System
Anything Internet bbs.bluemoon.net - Blue Moon BBS
http://www.bluemoon.net mud.bluemoon.net 4000 - MoonMUD
On Mon, 3 Nov 1997, Damien T. wrote:
> At 02:16 PM 11/2/97 -0800, you wrote:
>
> >Does your acceptable use policy allow your business clients to send bulk,
> >unsolicited commercial e-mail using your facilities?
>
> Yes it does. Provided that it is for a legitimate product and to a targeted
> list. The problems most people experience with spam is that the messages
> are not targeted, and aren't selling anything other than some scam or vaporware.
>
> >However, look at what happened in the early days of the fax machine.
> >Junk faxes. There are now laws against this. Dealing with junk e-mail
> >is the number one customer service issue here. Far more than busy
> >signals, installation problems, or PM-3 modems going ADMIN.
>
> That statement made my jaw drop. Although we no longer deal with consumer
> accounts, I could only pray that 'junk mail' could have been our number one
> customer service issue. My recollection is that in our case, the strange
> Win 95 dial-up networking bugs probably caused us the most headaches. It's
> amazing that your customers call you more about junk mail than anything else.
>
> >> While I agree that none of us want Livingston to become a spam factory,
> >> e-mail has become a legitimate business tool. Receiving an unsolicited
> >> message from Livingston via e-mail isn't any different that receiving the
> >> unsolicited snail mail brochures that come from them on a periodic basis.
> >
> >Yes it is. You don't get their snail-mail postage due. Their
> >telemarketers don't call you collect. E-mail is indeed a legitimate
> >business tool. Unsolicited, bulk, commercial e-mail is not. It is
> >pollution.
>
> I don't get commercial e-mail postage due, either. Neither do our
> customers. All billing to customers and our circuit costs are at a fixed
> monthly rate, and smtp traffic is such a tiny fraction of what flows through
> the network as to be negligible.
>
> >You consider the sending of bulk, unsolicited, commercial e-mail to be
> >one of the very benefits of the Internet and you're working hard to
> >convey this to your business customers? Really?
>
> I consider the Internet to be a communications network. It's not much
> different than the telephone network in terms of our acceptable use policy,
> and since telephone networks are slowing moving away from being circuit
> switched platforms to packet switched like the Internet itself, I'm not sure
> there is going to be any huge difference in a few years.
>
> If one of our customers can lawfully pick up the phone and call 400 people
> (using the Livingston issue as an example) and ask them if they'd like to
> get a newsletter subscription or more info on a product that they are
> selling, then they are welcome to purchase bandwidth from us and send that
> same message to those same customers instead.
>
> We're not talking Cyberpromo or Savetrees here. A message to 400 ISPs about
> networking equipment is not inappropriate in my view. Sending that same
> message to 6 million AOL users is another story.
>
> >Certainly, translating the investment to sales dollars is one of the
> >primary reasons why businesses connect to the net. Prospecting online,
> >if it involves spam, is going over the edge.
>
> Again, I don't think so when it involves a very targeted list. You received
> e-mail from someone at Livingston because you are known to buy that type of
> hardware. These types of e-mail are not spam when compared to e-mail about
> some "home based business opportunity" or MLM scam.
>
> >The issue is that of the "camel's nose under the tent" where once you
> >open the door to a little bit of spam, you're buried in it.
>
> Well, how do you control what communications you receive? How do you
> balance someone's right to send a message vs your right not to receive a
> message...assuming such 'rights' even exist? The sender paid the way for
> that message to arrive at a NAP somewhere, and you paid for it to be
> delivered from that NAP to whatever box on which you receive your mail.
>
> If it was a phone call rather than an e-mail message, what do you do? Turn
> off the ringer on your phone? There are some tradeoffs involved in
> connecting a computer to a global communications network, and I started this
> thread because I expected you to understand that more so than most people
> and was surprised that you went ballistic over the mail from Livingston.
>
> To me, it was a reaction totally out of proportion to the stimuli.
>
> But what do I know. I can't argue with your option to feel any way you like
> about that.
>
> Damien
>
>
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