At 07:48 AM 2003-08-28 -0400, Bernie Cosell wrote:
>On 28 Aug 2003 at 0:26, murr rhame wrote:
>
> > Spam haven or not, I don't like the precedent of a court forcing
> > an ISP to accept email from another ISP. One of the few
> > inalienable rights you have on the net is the right to refuse to
> > listen.
>
>But the question might be one of the duty of the *transport* providers.
>Notice that if you refuse to accept email addressed to me, then you
>deprive me of *MY* right to decide to 'listen' or not -- you've already
>made the decision for me.
No, you can always find an ISP who agrees with your views. The point is
that AOL is doing the right thing for most of their users. Seriously: I
have users who have AOL only addresses who believe that (for example)
unsubscribing at all unsubscribe links has lessened their spam, precisely
because AOL is blocking it.
>So one way to look at it is whether the sysadmins are actually the focal
>points [and we users who rely on them to receive our email] merely their
>minions subject to their whims [hello world.std.com]; or whether the
>*users* are the focal point and the sysadmins are supposed to be serving
>_them_. [I won't use an ISP [and will try to get others to boycott it,
>too] that tells me what email I can and cannot receive].
Find an ISP that does what you want (there are some, I'm sure).
I had a friend who demonstrated on her three year old the futility of
offering infinite choice: "What do you want for dinner?" invoked a blank
stare, as the kid was lost in the endless realms of possibility --- but,
"Do you want hamburgers or hot dogs for dinner?" got an answer in a couple
of seconds.
Most users are at about that level: They want a small array of choices
that are mostly already correct so that there is no wrong choice. AOL
provides this. No, I would not use their service either, but I am not most
users.
>I don't mind *advice* or even handy tools to deal with certain classes of
>stuff automatically, but for me, at least, I want the decision on what to
>do with email addressed to me to reside with *ME*.
Of course you want this, you are an expert. I wrote demime because I could
not figure out how else to allow experts (who frequently despise HTML mail)
to co-exist with newbies (who can't figure out how to turn off html mail).
--
He said: "There are people from Baath here reporting everything that
goes on. There are cameras here recording our faces. If the Americans
were to withdraw and everything were to return to the way it was before,
we want to make sure that we survive the massacre that would follow
as Baath go house to house killing anyone who voiced opposition to
Saddam. In public, we always pledge our allegiance to Saddam, but in
our hearts we feel something else."
Nick Simicich - njs@scifi.squawk.com
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