--- Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2002 15:14:14 -0800 To: declanat_private From: Mike Masnick <mikeat_private> Subject: another anti-spam dictator Hi Declan, Following your emails about bad anti-spam policies, I thought you might be interested in this story as well. It's about Barry Shein, president of The World (one of the oldest "public" ISPs around), going somewhat ballistic when approached by a customer/friend asking about messages to him that were falsely being bounced as spam. http://www.internetwk.com/story/INW20021219S0003 My own thoughts on it were posted here: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20021219/151210_F.shtml Clearly, spam is a problem for ISPs (moreso, even than for end-users), but his response seems to go a bit too far - especially when he's being asked by a customer about a specific, identifiable case of a false positive. His response is: "The one thing I won't do is spend a remaining minute of our time talking about false positives. If we all go down in blazes, I don't care any more." He also has a theory that spam is really a cyberterrorist denial of service attack. Nice to see anti-spam folks taking a reasonable approach to all this, yes? It's going to increasingly become an issue for end-users in choosing who their ISP is. Clearly, some spam filters are helpful, but there needs to be some flexibility involved. Self-declared, anti-spam dictators are causing almost as many problems as they think they're solving. Mike http://www.techdirt.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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