EFF whitepaper

Peering Peering at xspedius.com
Mon Nov 15 15:07:20 UTC 2004


>From personal experience, whether you check that you want further
mailings from MoveOn.org or not, they send them to you anytime you send
anything (petitions, letters, etc) from their website.  They're also not
that great about taking you off when you complain (I have had to
complain 2-3 times per incident).  For this reason, no matter how I feel
about the subject, I won't go through them anymore.

Hopefully one of their contacts is listening, because their mail policy
is really obnoxious.

Diane Turley
Network Engineer
Xspedius Communications Co.
636-625-7178


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Paul Vixie
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2004 10:45 PM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: EFF whitepaper



sean at donelan.com (Sean Donelan) writes:

> http://www.eff.org/wp/?f=SpamCollateralDamage.html

excerpt:

        I. The Problem   

        MoveOn.org is a politically progressive organization that
engages
        in online activism. For the most part, its work consists of
sending
        out action alerts to its members via email lists.  Often, these
        alerts will ask subscribers to send letters to their
        representatives about time-sensitive issues, or provide details
        about upcoming political events. Although people on the
MoveOn.org
        email lists have specifically requested to receive these alerts,
        many large ISPs regularly block them because they assume bulk
email
        is spam. [...]

i reject all mail from moveon.org here.  not because i assume bulk
e-mail is spam, but because i still personally receive all mail sent to
any address at cix.net, and quite a few people who wish to subscribe
from cox.net end up typing cix.net by mistake.  ("i" and "o" are
adjacent in QWERTYland.) i'm therefore in a position to prove that
moveon.org does not verify the ownership or permission status of new
e-mail addresses before sending political information.  i tried
complaining, but moveon.org's postmaster function appeared to be
understaffed or overworked or both.

further down in this otherwise excellent paper, we see:

        II. The Solution (Or At Least A Start): Principles and Best
Practices 
        [...]
                2. All mailing-list email should be delivered to willing
                   subscribers. As a corollary, no one should be
subscribed
                   to an email list without his or her knowledge and
                   consent, as evidenced by positive action.

...to which i must add my strongest possible agreement.  if moveon.org
would just follow this principle or best practice, i would accept their
e-mail here.  even though i found this EFF paper to be well written and
well researched in other ways, i wonder if the authors knew that
moveon.org does not verify permission or ownership of new subscribers,
and if they considered this as one of the possible reasons why a lot of
e-mail admins reject, as i do, all mail that comes from moveon.org.  if
not, then the fundamental premise of this paper is flawed.  if so, then
they should have mentioned this factor.  either way, i'm not as
impressed as i could've been.
-- 
Paul Vixie



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