At 16:36 -0600 2/15/98, Jim Choate wrote:
Newspaper editors work according to policies and trusts empowered by the owners of the paper. They are allowed as a function of the views of the owners to express that choice as an *employee* of those owners. Those policies do not apply to the readers as would happen in the case of an ISP. Unless you propose that each person should have multiple accounts at multiple ISP's.
At 06:43 PM 2/15/98 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
This is so incoherent that it's not possible to turn into a positive statement.
I found it pretty easy to parse, though incorrect - Jim assumes that each person will only deal with one ISP, and that getting spam filtering from that ISP means turning over control of all your incoming mail/news to the ISP. It's a bad assumption (even if I'm mistaken in claiming Jim assumes it :-) -- of course everybody should have multiple Internet service providers. As a Silicon Valley geek, I deal with several different ISPs offering dialup IP service, not counting my employer's dial and LAN access, or Metricom if I get it, but for most people, that's an exception. Dialup IP packet forwarding isn't the only service provided on the Net! I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists, and even if I used an ISP that provided filtering services, I'd expect it to leave the mailing list traffic alone (and expect some of the lists to try and reduce spam sent to the list.) I also use a couple of mail forwarders - I advertise pobox.com, since it's convenient to have a permanent address even if I change ISPs. Occasionally I'll use a nymserver if I want to keep separate reputations, or an anonymous remailer for non-persistent or non-replyable email services. Pobox offers spam filtering, and while I don't use it, I think it's the service that gives you a summary of all the email it rejected if you want, which makes it much more likely that I'd buy such a service. I've found that almost all the mail I get addressed directly to my netcom address is spam (some of it's mail from real people with my old address, or mailing lists I haven't reconfigured yet.) It's convenient to be able to tell, just as I know that junk snailmail addressed to "Wired Stewart" is from the subscription I had a few years ago... I also have a couple of free services that I play with, and one of my cats has a Juno account she's been using to experiment with remailers on. And for new people getting on the net, it really makes sense to use hotmail or juno for a while until you know what you're doing, so you don't have spam following you around your whole life. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639