I don't make a habit of forwarding personal email, but this
feels like a form letter and concerns all of us:
Paul Randal, writes:
> From randal@movies.enet.dec.com Thu Aug 29 09:57:51 1996
> Message-Id: <199608291357.PAA05996@vbormc.vbo.dec.com>
> Date: Thu, 29 Aug 96 15:58:24 MET DST
> From: "Paul Randal, " <randal@movies.enet.dec.com>
> To: "jeffw@smoe.org"@vbormc.vbo.dec.com
> Apparently-To: jeffw@smoe.org
> Subject: Here's some more info for you..
>
> We apologize if our recent mailings to your listservers caused you any trouble.
> What follows is an explanation of what happened, why, and what we've learned
> from it.
>
> As some background, we're currently evaluating a possible internet email white
> pages service. If this service proves to be viable, it should allow queries
> for people based on their real world names, probably through both a web
> interface and an address book, for those mail clients that can support it.
>
> For this service to be viable, there are two things that we feel we have to be
> able to do. First, we have to be able to populate the database in some
> relatively automated manner from already public data. Second, we nust be able
> to limit the ability of users of the service to browse that data so that it
> cannot be used to easily extract large mailing lists.
>
> For the first point above, we've been pursuing gathering data from several
> public sources, one of which was the PAML list. Your site was contacted
> during our test run as a result of our analysis of that list. Again we
> apologise if this inconvenienced you.
>
> We have learned a couple of things from this test run. First, the batched
> approach we took appears to have been both an annoyingly high load for some
> systems, and a concern for those system administrators. It was clearly not our
> intention that either happen. We are currently evaluating reducing the peak
> levels of activity by partial, more balanced data crawls on a somewhat more
> frequent basis. Second, we believe that we need a way for system
> administrators to both allow a list to be public and to avoid data crawls such
> as this. We are currently looking into ways to automatically do this.
>
> While we expect to need to periodically refresh our email data, we want to
> emphasize that we will not do so until the above two points have been
> incorporated.
>
> Thank you for your patience.
>
>
>
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