Many Important Items in the News

[Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>]

>I think an enlightened approach that eschews a single, network-wide
>policy on the acceptability of anonymous messages in favor of leaving
>it up to the individual email recipient is something that we could
>sell to the Internet as a whole. 

It would help if there existed some filter software that automatically
installed itself in a user's .forward and filter out anonymous posts
(and nothing else).  Such a tool should be written in nothing more
than shell scripts and grep, for the absolute widest in portability.
(Not even perl, which, believe it or not, is not yet universally
available.)

Were such a utility posted to alt.sources, and if all a user had to do
was ftp it from an archive, unpack it, and run it once, we would be in
a much better position politically, (even if the utility received very
little use).

It is difficult to install mail filters.  Our argument for user
filtering would be much stronger if installation were simple.

A similar argument holds for anonymous posting filters in a global
KILL file.

Eric