About "free speech" in a limited medium
Most Greens are fairly new to email. Not only did they miss the orientation, but they've never known a mailbox without spam. Hardly any of us have used Usenet News. Over half of us use corporate "free" email which is provided to deliver advertisements and collect consumer information for data mining, and have never known professional email, but don't realize how bad the service we've chosen is.
(I'm including the email service that comes with cable TV and low-ball telco DSL. They're barely breaking even on the Internet access service. Their email service follows the commercial "free email" model. Most of AT&T's residential DSL customers are actually using Yahoo Mail. Like television, you're the product, not the customer.)
And it's quite obvious that many of us have never been on a well moderated, productive, professional mailing list. It's hard to imagine things you've never seen. Our expectations are pretty low. It's the height of arrogance to imagine that things you've never seen can't exist.
I'd been running my own email for a few years when I got my first spam. It made no sense. Everybody knew the economics of email: the recipient pays most of the cost, and there's no postage because it's assumed the message is something the recipient wants. There's no right to have your email delivered. It's a privilege you earn by sending stuff people enjoy or find valuable in their work. Recipients have a right to reject or discard your traffic anywhere in their delivery system, for any reason they choose. Almost everyone delegates at least part of that decisionmaking to their email service providers.
Likewise, you earn your subscription on a mailing list by following its rules, however arbitrarily they may be applied. List owners compete. If a list isn't run the way its owner promised, it doesn't deliver the value its subscribers expected, and the subscribers "vote with their feet" for a competing list more to their liking. For example, someone who doesn't like the way the "affairs" list on gpus.org is run might start a competing discussion list on some other service.
That's the understanding that made Internet email without postage possible. Without it, everyone would be receiving more email than they could possibly sort. Not read, sort. The capacity of the email system isn't limited by technology. It's limited by people's ability to deal with the incoming traffic.
Think about it. Could you "just hit delete" if you were getting ten times more unwanted email than you are now? A hundred times more? How much time are you willing to spend each day "just hitting delete?" How much legitimate mail are you willing to "just hit delete" by mistake in your haste to wade through the junk? How much more junk would it take for you to abandon the medium? In 2006, fewer people told pollsters they were using email than in 2005. People are abandoning the medium.
Under that model, sending unsolicited broadcast email was stealing service. And it was compelling unpaid labor. Sanford Wallace had, essentially, walked into my office at 3Com and plastered his advertisement on my 19 inch .23 mm Pantone-calibrated Sun Microsystems monitor, by far the most valuable surface there. He argued that it was his "free speech" right to do that! Eventually Compuserve sued him and got a civil ruling that his behavior was illegal conversion of assets. Civil suits are about property, so the unpaid labor issue wasn't addressed.
Meanwhile the Direct Marketing Association, the lobbyist on capitol hill for the junk mail industry, was getting really worried. It was obvious that paper mail would be replaced by various electronic media. And they needed a way to force their torrent of crap (which they always refer to as "valuable offers" or "consumer information"...) into those new media. And the spammers had handed them just the obfuscatory tactic they needed. Spamming was free speech! They would fight any legislation on that grounds.
Junk faxing wasn't outlawed in '91. (Wikipedia's article on Wallace is wrong about that.) The junk faxers had argued free speech, too. Instead, the '91 telecom act created a private right of action. You could take an unsolicited commercial fax to small claims and win $500 from the sender. If you could prove he knew better (a repeat offense) you could win $1500. Fax owners could once again leave their machines on overnight without the bulkers using up their paper and toner. We had one chance, in 1999, to amend that act to treat email storage "mailbox" files the same way. But the ACLU, a suspected member of the Direct Marketing Association and big-time junk mailer, didn't want to lose its presumed "right to spam" so it lobbied the Judiciary Committee, mainly the idiot Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), to spike that bill.
Spam's exponential growth continued. It's over 99% of email starts today. It's destroying the medium. You can bet Microsoft and Google have their own private systems on the shelf, waiting to replace it, with postage and advertising and real censorship and spying built in. Watch for Microsoft Family-Friendly Super Email at a store near you.
So you can see that this "free speech" argument, applied to email, is a false presumption, invented by the dregs of the advertising industry and foisted on an ignorant public through a gullible congresswoman. And there's real harm in it. Email is the life blood of a lot of progressive organizing, and the corporations are trying really hard to take it away from us, and the people they've fooled are helping them do it. Which side are you on?
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We have been hearing about the impending collapse of the internet from the exponential growth of spam email for about a decade now. I don't have a spam problem. I employ simple and freely available filters to remove most of it from ever showing up in my in box. Most people I know prefer to use gmail or hotmail. I don't. However, they don't have much of a problem with spam, either.
Corporations are trying to take my email away from me? What proportion of the total internet bandwidth is consumed from the bad behavior of spammers? Although I understand that spammers send out huge amounts of unwanted email that never arrive at their intended destinations, how much bandwidth do the 'starts' consume relative to, say, porn on the web?
If I am missing something and the spam Armageddon is about to occur, then I urge Cameron to present the evidence and then post his ideas for solving the problem. Until we are presented with that which is missing, I suggest that we focus on the mountains instead of the mole hills.
"The capacity of the email system isn't limited by technology. It's limited by people's ability to deal with the incoming traffic."
Cameron wrote:
And I responded:
So as you can clearly see, in that particular excerpt I was referring to filtering unwanted email before it ever gets to me -- i.e., filtered at the server. No in box problem. No sorting problem. No bandwidth problem.
Still think its a mole hill.
I am not worried about email being taken over by Bill Gates. I am worried about global warming/dimming and universal healthcare and the collapse of home values and the economy in general. I could go on, but those are quite sufficient to make me feel like Sisyphus.
I know that much of the email that might have come through to me never reaches my inbox. I use the cable company Charter Communications for both television and internet access.
They even filter my outgoing email I particpate as an author on a blog site dedicated to removing Republican blowhard Dana Rohrabacher from Congress. The site is used by both Greens and Democrats. The title is "Ditch Cracy Dana" and the URL is http://crazydana.blogspot.com/ If I send an email with that URL is it, charter.net will reject it as SPAM. If I take out the URL and resend the same message, it goes through. I have no problem with any other blogger URL's so it appears that the filter is catching the word "crazydana" and flagging it.
Just an example of rules based regulation that took me some segment of time to figure out and for which I will not even get emotional compensation.
"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth" Roberto Clemente
I'm curious to know how many local Green groups use email effectively to reach registered Greens or those who identify themselves as Green.
I'm a local chair and I use Constant Contact as a direct mail service to send out a monthly newsletter to as many Greens as I can get addresses for, which is sometimes challenging as most voter registration forms don't request this data. With rising postage costs it's clearly the most economical method of communication. With all of the junk flying though, one needs all the help one can get to ensure that email looks readable and not deletable, which is why I employ a template.
I'm wondering though, whether the old fashioned method of snail mail might prove to win out in the end.
How do most groups communicate here?
... we have a monthly email newsletter that goes out to over 500 subscribers. We have also mailed our quarterly newspaper, The Green Light, to several hundred members and have done direct mailings as well. The cost of mailing has always been an issue and is the primary factor limiting our use of snail mail.