A couple of points:
First, the admin should be alerted the unsub function of this list doesn't work. No big deal, not a complaint, no law suits in the works. :-) And yes, I used to own a list hosting company, so I know how to complete the unsub procedure. I'm only mentioning this to help you avoid controversy with others. Actually, I'm pleased it didn't work. One more chance to honk my blowhard horn! :-) Second, here's what I've learned about white listing thanks to the generous responses of this list (and a few other forums). a) I've seen no evidence that a closed mailbox white list world is not less problematic than an open mailbox blacklist oriented world, **when all factors are considered on balance**. If we could, for instance, return to 1970 and redesign the email system from scratch, knowing what we know now, we would be insane to build another open mailbox system knowing with certainty that this would lead directly to the birth of the spam industry. However: b) this isn't 1970, and we can't start again with a clean slate. It is simply too late to go back, start over, or introduce a 180 degree paradigm shift. The transition issues are indeed too great an obstacle. I see that now. As I considered the appeal of white listing I was thinking theoretically, not practically, and I now realize this error, and am glad to be relieved of it. Thanks to you all, really. For me personally this marks the end of 7 years of interest in spam. Blacklisting is like being a garbage man. Every day the garbage piles up, and you take it to the dump. Day after day after day, from now until the end of time. Important work, but not interesting work. Been there, done that, experienced the outrage etc. For me personally, it seems that other social issues are more deserving of whatever free time I may have available. White listing seemed to offer the opportunity to redesign most of the garbage out of the system, and this propect was fascinating to me. I wish all the other techniques proposed here luck, but my bottom line instinct is that open mailboxes and spam are inseperable concepts. I predict that unless ordinary users are given some vision of victory they can understand they will also leave this discussion and be unavailable as political allies. Complaining about unchangable phenomena, like bad weather, is only interesting for so long. I hope I'm wrong (really), but...... >The problem inherent in a whitelisting world is that I can't post a >question on Usenet and get answers from people I never heard of >emailed to me. > >Likewise, I can't give out my email address without knowing the email >address of the recipient (so contact addresses on web pages, for >instance, are no good; neither are email addresses on business cards, >for the most part). For the final time, there is absolutely nothing about white listing that prevents these exchanges. Nothing whatsoever, not one little thing. White listing does introduce a new step in receiving mail from strangers. That step is clicking on a link in an autoreply. This step is undoubtably a new inconvenience. However, this one little step would, if adopted widely, replace a universe of other problems that are so well known to this group that I wont repeat them here. Great discussion folks! Thanks again. Phil _______________________________________________ spamcon-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.spamcon.org/mailman/listinfo/spamcon-general#subscribers Subscribe, unsubscribe, etc: Use the URL above or send "help" in body of message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
