This is the entire point. One can form their self-appointed committees and
groups, but to get your ideas/stardards accepted there must be a *cost vs.
benefit* analysis. *Why* should someone incorporate these
*standards/suggestions*? What is the benefit to them if they do? What is the
cost if they don't?
If the answers to the latter two questions approach - none/none - then there
will never be acceptance.
This is of course why *bulk email*, solicited or not, is here to stay. Yes
it is not going away and there is nothing anyone or group can do to make it
go away - Why?, it works for the marketer. The discussions on this issue
would be better spent on developing ways to live with it, not
unrealistically and improbably arguing how to stop what can't be stopped.
>Although I appreciate the technology of ActiveAgent, I doubt I would ever
use it=20
>personally. I don't see much difference between ActiveAgent and junkmail
delivered=20
>by the postoffice. Every day I have to roundfile all the junk mailings
stuck in my=20
>PO box. On the other hand, it must pay off for the advertisers because=
they=20
>continue to send it. I'm sure the mailman (or sysadmin) would prefer to=
avoid=20
>dealing with what I consider nuisance mail, but he doesn't have that=
option.
A couple of big defining differences here: ActiveAgent only sends one piece
of email to only those people who have deliberately solicited the receipt of
email, both in fact and in law. The junk mail that you receive in your PO
box represents, collectively, entire forests destroyed almost daily, plus
millions of gallons of burned fossil fuels to deliver these spent forests
to your door so that you can place them in the landfill, even if you
liked/wanted and purchased the product! Unwanted email is merely a *delete*
button away from the bit-bucket. No destroyed forests, no toxic effluent
from paper mills, no massive amounts of burned fossil fuels delivering the
paper across the world, no clogged landfills ... etc.
>From an environmental standpoint, far from trying to prohibit *junk email*
it should be a national imperative and a congressional mandate that all
commercial marketeers *must* use electronic messages and immediately cease
and desist the planet destroying snail mail practices. All net citizens
should accept as a moral imperative the *hassle* of having to delete even
100s of unwanted/uninteresting emails per day. ISPs should require it in
their service contracts, that all users, in order to take an active and
positive step in mitigating one of the major environmental crisis' today,
must willing receive (and delete) all commercial email. If each and every
netzien had to delete 100s of messages daily as a requirement of membership
in the internet community, it would be a very, very small price to pay in
exchange for the priceless benefits associated with this.=20
>
>Agent technology is in its infancy and ActiveAgent is just a simple primer
on the=20
>types of agents which will be available in the not-too-distant future. In
fact,=20
>ActiveAgent will pale in comparison to future intelligent agent technology.
>
>My real goal in subscribing to the list was a hope that we could discuss=
robot=20
>technology and how it can be expanded, not limited (contextual agents,
alife based=20
>agents, filtering agents, etc.). =20
>
>Perhaps I need to reemphasize the point that most programmers/users don't
care about=20
>the strain placed on webservers, nor do they care about making life easier
for a=20
>sysadmin. If I bring your server to its knees, I really don't care -- you
should=20
>have protected yourself. If you think life is difficult now, just wait=
until=20
>intelligent user-agents are released to the general public.
>
>A client of mine, a government agency, received over 3,000 1MB MIME emails
to the=20
>webpage mailto over a three-day holiday which crashed their internal mail
system. =20
>(Some hacker with a grudge spammed them.) What do you suppose the solution
was?
>
Exactly, if you don't want public contact, don't give public access. Its
called *setting permissions* - hello? Any sysops remember that chapter...?
admin
"delete the message, not the forest=AE"
>-- Joe
>
>Joseph Whitmore
>Interim, Inc.
>Washington, DC
>
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>
>
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