On Tue, 9 Apr 1996 09:08:20 -0800 Brent Chapman <Brent@GreatCircle.COM>
said:
>On the other hand, they could have simply subscribed to your lists
>without bothering to ask first, and chances are you'd never have
>noticed.
It would have looked like a subscription spoof and been handled
accordingly. Sorry, it's not like it's not been tried before.
>And look at this from another point of view: I intend to allow them to
>subscribe to my lists. If they changed their default, then I'd have to
>manually process all their subscriptions, or send back a message saying
>"Yes, it's OK for you to subscribe."
Which would take you all of 30 seconds. My point being that THEY are
going to make money on the lists YOU run, typically on a volunteer basis,
and it is only fair that THEY should make the effort. This includes the
effort of adding 10 lines to their perl script so that they only send one
request for all the lists hosted at any given machine, to which you can
answer either YES TO ALL or YES TO THE FOLLOWING. Then it takes you just
as long to say yes or no.
>The question is, which is more common: list owners that are going to say
>yes, or list owners that are going to say no? I think the former;
And you're perfectly right. If being on vacation or not having the time
to answer REJECT to 150 automatically generated messages counts as a yes,
there's no question that most of the list owners will say yes, not
necessarily because they think it will be a good service or because they
are eager to contribute to the paycheck of the author of sendmail, but
simply because they don't have the time or energy to turn it off.
Brent, your logic and rationale here follows the assumption that these
are good people who are out to do a Good Thing. I appreciate the fact
that you know them personally and may feel this way. The procedures and
etiquette, however, should be the same for any company that wishes to
provide this kind of service. It annoys me to think that if CyberPorn
Inc. made the same request tomorrow in exactly the same terms, except
with the intent to publish X-rated advertisements instead, people would
all be flaming them for having made it so difficult not to be included.
The thing is, personally I don't care if it's the Pope or CyberPorn Inc.
I expect the same courtesy from both in terms of not wasting my time, and
I respect the fact that both are equally entitled to hope that I will let
them access my lists and thus the most reasonable default is YES.
Eric
Follow-Ups:
|
|
