Re[2]: Donations

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 23:33:50 -0400 Joe Elliott <jee@domain.elided> wrote:
>Erik G Wood <genericwood@domain.elided> wrote:
> > But this discussion did get me thinking.  Is there a 
> >benefit of the "digest" format as it stands versus the services 
> >offered by YahooGroups, Topica and others (other than the 
> >advertisements on Yahoo that is)?  I have memberships in Alfa forums 
> >on all three. 

> I have to step in here.
 
> I made my (unfortunately small) donation, but would not have done so 
> for a web-based forum.

actually, topica and yahoo groups have email based serviceds, and Erik's
question is a fair one.

there are significant issues with Yahoo Groups and Topica. in both cases,
they belong to large businesses which might have had a geek outlook when
they started, but have since, in response to the tech bust and market
pressures, taken different approaches.

while topica continues to run their "free" email list services, they are
also working as a spamhaus on an outsourced basis, they have a number of
spamming customers. as such, there are parts of the net which decline all
email from topica.  i believe the most notable example is probably
outblaze.com/email.com, but as it happens my server rejects all topica
email because all i ever get from them is spam. even w/o the spamming
connection, they have some severely broken procedures, which they have been
aware of going on a year and a half and have yet to properly resolve.

yahoo groups isn't quite as nasty a situation. their main issue is that
they are pretty iffy about privacy and what they might do with your email
address once they have it.

by contrast, my personal guarantee to all subscribers to digest.net lists
is that i will never sell, give away, trade, or otherwise misuse an email
address.

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
    Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
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