From: Alan Olsen <alano@teleport.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 09:27:26 +0800
To: "Ross Wright" <jim@ACM.ORG
Subject: [rant] Re: Spamming (Good or Bad?)
Message-ID: <2.2.32.19960821203026.00c82314@mail.teleport.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 05:49 PM 8/20/96 +0000, Ross Wright wrote:
>On Or About 20 Aug 96, 16:23, Jim Gillogly wrote:
>> 
>> Vipul Ved Prakash <vipul@pobox.com> writes:
>> >I don't know if there has been much discussion on the ethics of
>> >spamming here? Is spamming free speech? 
>> 
>
>> I oppose spamming because it's rude and inefficient, lowering the
>> S/N everywhere it happens.  Market droids
>
>Market Droids????  As a salesman I take offence at this slur.

It is a mild term compared to some of the things that could be said about sales.

I have dealt with far too many sales people.  Few of them knew anything
about the products that they were selling.  (This is especially true of the
computer field.  "Do you know the difference between a computer salesman and
a car salesman?  The car salesman knows how to drive.")

Many people have a bad view of sales.  

<rant>
Mine is because of the times I have had to create the programs that sales
had promised, but had no clue as to what could and could not be done, or was
even practical.  Getting time lines set by people who have no clue as to how
long it will take or even if what they want is possible.  (More than once I
have received requests based on the pipe dreams of some idiot in sales that
contained contradictory requirements and/or absurd time lines.)

Most sales people do not care about what it takes to do something, all they
care about is making the sale.  What they tell the rube in the course of
selling it does not matter.  (Someone else will take care of it.)

But then, rarely does truth enter into the matter of sales...

Sales people have a bad reputation for a very good reason.  If they actually
had a basic understanding of what they were selling, and were not so
untrustworthy as to not commit to things that are not deliverable, they
would have that reputation.

The only people I have more contempt for than salesmen are salesmen for
multi-level companies.  (Except maybe government officials, but that is on a
case by case basis...)
</rant>

>> favor it because it's
>> cheap, and no matter how many people they piss off bigtime, they
>> make some sales.
>
>Even make sales to people who are pissed off at first...

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."

The biggest problem I have had with spammers in the last month or so are the
ones who insist on forging e-mail reply addresses.  Of course, being from a
sales background, they were too incompetent to cover up their tracks.
(Remember:  If you are going to post spam with a forged return address,
DON'T do it from your own uucp address.  The send path makes a great big
arrow pointing back to you.)

Spammers are more like the people who call you at home and try to sell you
things you do not want over the phone with recorded messages.

Sales on the Internet can be done and done without pissing off people.  But
what it takes is a shred of a clue.  By violating netiquite, the spammer has
shown that he lacks vital connection to anything resembling a clueserver.
Furthermore, much of what is spammed is either illegal (variants on the
"make money fast" idea of pyramid scheme) and/or posted to entire
hierarchies of groups.  (Most mail readers will not allow you to mark a
message as read in all of the newsgroups it is posted to.  And most of the
Windows newsreader do not have killfiles or they are buggy to the point of
unusability.)  I certainly do not want to read this crap over and over again.  

It is this repeated abuse that gets spammers mailbombed, feeds killed, etc. 

(And I will not even go into the type of sales promoted by Canter and Siegal
in their book on Internet sales.  Of course, considering their background
(i.e. lawyers for the Church of Scientology) it does not surprise me a whole
lot...)
---
Alan Olsen -- alano@teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction
        `finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key 
                http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ 
  "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon
                "Microsoft -- Nothing but NT promises."