Re: The Alfa BB lynch mob (OT)

[Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>]

On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 23:30:15 -0500 James Cook <james@domain.elided> wrote:
> ... take a pill already
 
> ok, so some guy gets himself some bad karma by scraping email adresses
> out
> of the digest - thats kinda bad alright. (Altough I'm inclined to give
> him
> the benefit of the doubt for now - an alfa bb ain't a bad idea)

this will be my last comment on the subject.

i have no particular objection to the alfa bb itself.

however, i've been managing and maintaining mailing lists for 15+ years,
and the deliberate theft of email address isn't "kinda bad", it's a
fairly egregious bit of abuse. in a different climate i might have reacted
differently, but i'm very involved in the anti-spam community and the
concept of "permission" is at the core of everything -- permission to send
to an email address. by singing up for the alfa-digest, you all implicitly
grant permission for me to send it to you. the somewhat clumsy confirmation
step is needed so you can't be forge subscribed by a mail bomber. [note 1]

you never granted me permission to give your email address to someone else.
i understand this, and i never give it out to anyone else. [note 2]

someone went and took all the email addresses off the digest and emailed to
them w/o permission of any of the owners of those addresses. this ends up
falling right at the core of the current debate about spam and permission.

i hope you now understand why i take this so seriously.

richard

notes:
[1] this is what the anti-spam community calls "confirmed opt-in", and the
marketing community wants to call "double opt-in" in order to make it seem
somehow unreasonable. mail bombing and other types of unconfirmed signups
are a serious problem. see the story of nadine for an example of an
unconfirmed signup and how it went awry:

http://www.honet.com/Nadine/default.htm

[2] some elements in the marketing community run around selling "opt-in"
lists, and running questionable co-registration and affilitate programs
that involve a lot of mailing list swapping. see the story of nadine, url
above, for horrifying examples.
--
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
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