internet idealism (Re: what the heck do i do now?)

Thu Feb 1 20:31:25 UTC 2007

brian at meganet.net (Brian Wallingford) writes:

> Ultimately, the problem is that the idealism which was more or less the
> rule a decade ago has taken a backseat to commercialism ...

i dunno about that.  i see a lot of idealism still.  volunteers at spamhaus,
and within the da/mwp community, and at cymru, are still going quite strong.

and in an odd twist of fate's knife, i still hold the "cix.net" domain which
was very quiet until COX went into the internet business a few years back.
since "i" and "o" are adjacent in qwertyland, i get a whole lotta misdirected
e-mail, including a lot of 1x1 correspondance from folks who mistyped their
source-email-address in their e-mail reader and then proceeded to correspond.

rather than bounce it all, i answer it with the following template:

	there is no such person here at cix.net.

        try cox.net.

        re:

and then i include-all the mail they sent to me by mistake.  eventually i
got tired of explaining to the senders why "paul at vix.com" was answering their
e-mail, and so i started forging the source of my response to be the cix.net
address they were trying to reach.  i've got it all down to a couple of MH-E
keystrokes and macros and e-lisp functions now.  i just don't like the idea
of bouncing the stuff outright, since a lot of the senders will never guess
what went wrong.  (i also appreciate the extra spam, for robot-training use.)
it's only a dozen messages a day, on average, and thus: idealism isn't dead.
-- 
Paul Vixie