🚀 go-pugleaf

chet (murray@gwis.com) wrote:

: And the "junk mail" subsidizes that rate, so no, it would not as necessarily 
: raise the normal rates.  Do you send 100? 200 pieces of mail a month?  How 
: about 1000 free?  After that there is a charge.  Its not like the mail isn't 
: traceable.  But why should my mailbox be filled just because I post?  

Chet, you are absolutely right. There are two schools of thought on this
subject, and you and I seem to be in the same camp: Junk e-mail does cost
time and money (money paid sometimes by the user, sometimes by the ISP, and
sometimes by both). And we both agree that mail costs shouldn't be borne by
the recipient.

:   THe spam on the newsgroups coupled with the junk mail is rewarding people 
: to not take part in the internet, but to passively watch it all as one big 
: glob of crap.  To sit there and say "Oh well nothing can be done!" is 
: idiotic, why should a newer system of communications be saddled by the legacy 
: of an older system of payment?  E-mail on the internet does not have to 
: follow the example of regular mail.  It can be more closely regulated.  Does 
: that stink of the goverment sticking its nose in something? or a sensible 
: answer to a big problem?

That's a bit of a sticky issue. People who shouted down parts of the Com-
munications Decency Act would argue that there is too much regulation already.
I can agree that too much is bad, but I might also argue that not enough is 
just as bad. 

Your idea of the first thousand e-mails free sounds like a decent idea,
except that administrators of mailing lists, people who are legitimately
sending tons of mail, may get hit hard. There are a lot of technological
issues, too. I don't know if you are familiar with sendmail, the mail 
transport program used by a majority of Internet providers, but sendmail
is real versatile. You can do a lot of things with it. In addition, here
on NACS, and also on APK... and probably on several other providers too..
there are packages, Procmail being one... (that's the one on NACS and APK)
that allow you to configure how mail is sent and received. Let me do a 
little "compare-and-contrast"... Some time ago (we're talking a few years
back) on APK, when Zbig decided he needed to create a place for tech support
comments and questions to go to, he created support@apk.net. It was an actual
user account that you could log into and read the tech support e-mail, and
had a single e-mailbox associated with it. You can send mail to support
@nacs.net, too. But there is no such user on our machines. The account 
"support" doesn't exist. support exists only as a _mail alias_, and it expands
to a mailing list.

Now, let's assume that APK still has their support mailbox set up as a
single account and a single mailbox. Let's say you send a message to 
support@apk.net and send a copy to support@nacs.net. Do you charge for one
e-mail to APK's support, and then charge for an e-mail to each address on
NACS's list? OR do you just charge for one e-mail to NACS and one to APK? Hey,
this is a tech support question, conceivably from a customer of yours... do
you really want to charge him for tech support e-mail anyhow?

(see what I'm getting at? I suppose these would have to be decisions that are
made by the individual ISP's, but the point is there are a lot of little 
details to be worked out.)

I think you might be on the right track, though...

-- 
Steve Sobol, Cleveland, OH    Tech Support/Customer Service, NACS.NET
 -also-     Win 95 Programmer and Head Geek, North Shore Technologies
sjsobol@nacs.net | "He wanted to know what Token Ring was. And DON'T tell him
sjsobol@nstc.com | it's a bunch of people standing in a circle smoking pot!"