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

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 6 Feb 2006, Jonathan King wrote:

> 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.

Leaving Yahoo because of that will become very likely.  If their goal is 
to serve users, they won't do that.  If they want to make money, I don't 
see how putting list mail into a spam box will help them because it will 
be very annoying for users.


> 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.

How long did it take after email was designed before the distribution list 
was conceived?  I'll guess that it took them 15 minutes to think of that. 
In other words, I think we've had the distribution list for as long as 
we've had email.  For most of us, the majority of our messages come to us 
from distribution lists.

I'm not saying that Yahoo and AOL won't screw up, but I am saying that 
they can, in principle, add this new feature without messing things up for 
anyone but the spammers.


> > 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.

The only thing I prefer to gmail is to run my own email system.  Right now 
it's sendmail with procmail and pine.  This allows me more flexibility 
than I get from gmail.

Mike

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