Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] The eminent victory of spam

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 2/6/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
>
> I'm not clear on how they will decide.  If they see 100,000 identical
> messages coming in from the same source, that must be "spam" but if they
> only see 100 such messages, is that "spam?"  Or do they ignore the numbers
> and consider every "Precendence: Bulk" message to be spam?  What about
> "Precedence: List?"  I really doubt that this new plan will affect mail
> from MLUG or similar lists.  They do not want to piss off their customers!

Actually, Russell has a good point; "real" mailing lists are a bit
tricky to handle this way.  Yahoo, for example, would like to handle
the list itself, or make you set up a Yahoo Group, and charging for
email is one way to make this more likely.

That said, it's not really clear to me that something like MLUG would
have to be a mailing list at this point rather than a blog that had
(lightly) restricted access to make original posts and did RSS
notification on new postings.  Email was really designed to be person
to person rather than anything else.

> Also, how much of MLUG and FOSS-related email goes to AOL or Yahoo
> accounts?  Not much, I think, and those users will drop their accounts
> quickly if they don't like the new system.

I think the greater challenge is that any plan to charge people to
send (bulk) email really needs to be universal, and not just Yahoo or
AOL.  I know I have already posted my idealistic fantasies about using
email charges to fund universal net access for all, and I think that
this would still work.

> Again, I recommend Gmail.

Me, too. :-)  To be very honest, I've never used any email sytem
remotely as useful as gmail, and this does surprise me.

jking

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