At 02:48 PM 1/2/97 -0600, Virtual Joe wrote:
>Go to http://www.findmail.com/faq.html and read #6. It offers easy
>instructions regarding removing findmail.com from your lists and who to
>contact to make sure they stay off. #7 offers help on keeping individual
>messages from being archived.
Yes, this is known information, but it still doesn't excuse the fact
that what findmail.com are doing is wrong.
I very much dislike the concept that thousands of list owners would have
to go and alter their mailing list setup _just_ because findmail.com
says so.
Sooner or later I'll get around to my rebuttal to the findmail.com
FAQ statement that they're "just like the web search engines". Here's
something to get you started, though:
* Web search engines (such as AltaVista) may download your web pages,
but their goal is to get people to visit your page, not to provide
the information to everyone else and cut you out of the deal. When
you go to any of them, you get, at best, a "summary" or maybe the
first paragraph or so.
* findmail.com, on the other hand, will apparently be providing _my_
content (the mailing lists' messages) on _their_ site. This is
completely different. A search engine's quoting of the first few
lines of my web page is "fair use" and serves to get people to
visit the page. findmail.com's wholesale quoting of everything
that's been sent to my mailing lists is _not_ fair use, and in
fact detracts from the value of my lists.
* robots.txt has pretty much been around as long as there have been
web search engines; it's something that evolved early on in the
creation of the web. Thus, most webmasters _should_ know about
it; it's an official internet standard, right?
* Mailing lists, on the other hand, have been around the net long,
long before some Stanford CS dept employee got the idea of making
findmail.com -- to try to come along now and say "okay, here's
what you need to start doing, or else your lists are fair game
for me!" is silly. Next week, slurpmail.com or findstuff.com
might come and tell you, "okay, you have to put in X-Don't-Slurp"
headers on your messages -- who _are_ these people, and why do
they think that they have the right to dictate to me, in effect,
"make these changes or else I'll consider your copyright null
and void"?
Bogus.
Bogus, bogus, bogus.
--
/\ /\ /\ /\ Kynn Bartlett / kynn@idyllmtn.com
/ \ / \/ \ / \ Idyll Mountain Internet
/ \ //\ /\ \ / \ <URL:http://www.idyllmtn.com>
'_| _` // \/ \__\ '_| _` HTML Writers Guild Governing Board Member
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