Re: Should the Feds ban spam? (fwd)

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

>At 16:36 -0600 2/15/98, Jim Choate wrote:
>>Newspaper editors work according to policies and trusts empowered by the
>>owners of the paper. They are allowed as a function of the views of the
>>owners to express that choice as an *employee* of those owners. Those
>>policies do not apply to the readers as would happen in the case of an ISP.
>>Unless you propose that each person should have multiple accounts at
>>multiple ISP's.

At 06:43 PM 2/15/98 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>This is so incoherent that it's not possible to turn into a positive statement.

I found it pretty easy to parse, though incorrect -
Jim assumes that each person will only deal with one ISP,
and that getting spam filtering from that ISP means turning
over control of all your incoming mail/news to the ISP.
It's a bad assumption (even if I'm mistaken in claiming Jim assumes it :-)
-- of course everybody should have multiple Internet service providers.
As a Silicon Valley geek, I deal with several different ISPs offering
dialup IP service, not counting my employer's dial and LAN access,
or Metricom if I get it, but for most people, that's an exception.

Dialup IP packet forwarding isn't the only service provided on the Net!
I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists, 
and even if I used an ISP that provided filtering services, 
I'd expect it to leave the mailing list traffic alone 
(and expect some of the lists to try and reduce spam sent to the list.)  
I also use a couple of mail forwarders - I advertise pobox.com,
since it's convenient to have a permanent address even if I change ISPs.
Occasionally I'll use a nymserver if I want to keep separate
reputations, or an anonymous remailer for non-persistent or
non-replyable email services.  Pobox offers spam filtering,
and while I don't use it, I think it's the service that
gives you a summary of all the email it rejected if you want,
which makes it much more likely that I'd buy such a service.

I've found that almost all the mail I get addressed directly to 
my netcom address is spam (some of it's mail from real people 
with my old address, or mailing lists I haven't reconfigured yet.)
It's convenient to be able to tell, just as I know that
junk snailmail addressed to "Wired Stewart" is from the
subscription I had a few years ago...

I also have a couple of free services that I play with, and one 
of my cats has a Juno account she's been using to experiment 
with remailers on.   And for new people getting on the net,
it really makes sense to use hotmail or juno for a while
until you know what you're doing, so you don't have spam
following you around your whole life.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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