...and don't cc: individuals!

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Sat Aug 25 10:26:47 PDT 2001


On Saturday, August 25, 2001, at 12:56 PM, someone wrote:

> I'd appreciate your not addressing mail to me concerning
> Jim Bell, though that may be due to the way your mailer
> is set up to respond to cpunk mail.
>
> I got subpoenaed to the grand jury and trial because
> Jim Bell's responses to my messages to cpunks were
> addressed to me and cc'ed to cpunks, just as yours
.....
> And I will ask again to all readers in the universe: do not send
> me private e-mail about Jim Bell, CJ, or anybody likely to be a
> target of the SOBs working cybercrime-rich territory. Post
> your stuff to a public forum, and do not cc me.
>


And I urge people to spend the extra 10 seconds it takes to edit out all 
addresses except the CDR node they are sending their message to. (I have 
to do this with my mailer, and I nearly always manage to edit out all of 
the various cc: and extraneous To: entries. Sometimes in haste I just 
hit "Reply" and forget to edit the fields. Mostly I do.)

The reasons for this are two-fold, not even counting "someone's" valid 
point about ignorami claiming "direct communication":

1) Everyone is getting the list, right? Except for rare cases when 
someone not subscribed to the list is copied as a courtesy, there is no 
need for them to receive a separate mailed copy and a mail-exploder 
copy. ("Robb, we may have another problem brewing on the Thought 
Criminal list...that smart-ass May just used the word "exploder" in a 
message.")

2) Editing out the extraneous cc:s helps to stop _others_ from further 
proliferating extra copies. (I've seen messages to Cypherpunks with half 
a dozen cc: entries, all to otherwise-subscribed members.)

To paraphrase one of the Orwellian barnyard animals : "Two copies bad."

My mailer allows me to just type "cy" in the To: field and it auto-fills 
with its best guess of what the address is. It also shows, after a 
delay, a pop-up of other possible addresses. Or cut-and-paste is easy. 
(I send traffic out to cypherpunks at lne.com, even if it arrives via 
another node. So I like the auto-fill more than cutting-and-pasting.)

Others may have macros which auto-type an address easily. Or even macros 
and scripts which discard all non-cypherpunks addresses from a reply.

In any case, it only takes about 10-20 seconds, tops.

--Tim May





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list