I agree. It's time to take mail anonymity into the mainstream. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for anonymity, as the Caller ID debate shows. I think an enlightened approach that eschews a single, network-wide policy on the acceptability of anonymous messages in favor of leaving it up to the individual email recipient is something that we could sell to the Internet as a whole. We shouldn't have to treat this as a confrontational either-or issue when there's a third way out that balances everybody's interests. Phil
Phil Karn writes:
I think an enlightened approach that eschews a single, network-wide policy on the acceptability of anonymous messages in favor of leaving it up to the individual email recipient is something that we could sell to the Internet as a whole.
You know, what we might to do is figure out a first cut position, and then set up a mock debate. Have some members 'role-play' vociforous opponents of nyms. That way we might be able to work out in advance good counter arguments for the nastiest objections any of us can think of. I'm sure the /real/ ojectors will come up with stuff we don't, but at least it would give us a leg up. I think I'd recommend setting this up as a formal 'game', with all participants adopting nyms to keep the argumentation distinct from normal discourse. Even if it was done on a separate mailing list. See, another good use for nyms <grin>. -- david david@staff.udc.upenn.edu
I think an enlightened approach that eschews a single, network-wide policy on the acceptability of anonymous messages in favor of leaving it up to the individual email recipient is something that we could sell to the Internet as a whole.
It would help if there existed some filter software that automatically installed itself in a user's .forward and filter out anonymous posts (and nothing else). Such a tool should be written in nothing more than shell scripts and grep, for the absolute widest in portability. (Not even perl, which, believe it or not, is not yet universally available.) Were such a utility posted to alt.sources, and if all a user had to do was ftp it from an archive, unpack it, and run it once, we would be in a much better position politically, (even if the utility received very little use). It is difficult to install mail filters. Our argument for user filtering would be much stronger if installation were simple. A similar argument holds for anonymous posting filters in a global KILL file. Eric
participants (3)
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david＠staff.udc.upenn.edu -
Eric Hughes -
karn＠qualcomm.com