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chairs message

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Subject: Re: [chairs] SPAM


All,

I have to confess that I have watched with mounting alarm the turn this discussion has
taken.

I would like to make a couple of observations, at the risk of sounding heretical and
ready to be tossed on the fire.

My first cause for alarm has been the casual easiness with which the openness of the
archives has been put aside. I believe that hiding the sender of archived messages in
a manner that makes it almost impossible for most human beings to respond to or contact the
sender easily does a disservice to the spirit of openness of OASIS itself. Openess has risks.
If we can't live with this we should neither belong to nor work in the OASIS environment.
Spamming is one of the risks. Being responded to by someone one has never met is another.
Or is that in fact an advantage rather than a risk? Sometimes it's a pain. Sometimes it's a real
pleasure. Are we going to deny this to ourselves just because some receive more spam than they know
how to deal with?

Another cause for concern has been the fact that *no one* has argued that OASIS is
the wrong point at which to fight the spam that individuals receive. First of all, there
is no evidence that the spam received by Duane (who started this thread) can or should be
blamed on OASIS archives. It's anecdotal. It's unprovable. In my particular anecdotal case
I don't believe I've experienced an increase in spam due to activities in OASIS. 70% of the
spam directed at me goes to eduardo@eng.sun.com, which is an address I have neither used
nor signed with for years and years. It nevertheless exists somewhere in the Internet; I
don't know where and I don't care. I just filter it out and inspect every so often. Because
that's one of the points at which one should fight spam: at the client level. Get yourself
an intelligent, spam aware client or filtering mechanism and smile. Don't mess with the
OASIS archives just because your IT department tells you you have to use a bad client. Don't
mess with the OASIS archives just because your IT department does not know how to filter spam.
The right points at which to fight spam are the client, the server, the law and the email
standards, not the OASIS archives.

Just like the only proven way of securing a computer from internet based
attacks is by unplugging it from the net, the only proven way of protecting oneself from spam
is by not sending email: every time you send email to someone whose computer could be
the victim of a virus, you run the risk of having your address forwarded to a spammer. Are
you going to stop sending email because of that? Or are you instead going to try to get the
right protection at the right level?


-- 
Eduardo Gutentag               |         e-mail: eduardo.gutentag@Sun.COM
Web Technologies and Standards |         Phone:  +1 510 550 4616 x31442
Sun Microsystems Inc.          |         W3C AC Rep / OASIS BoD


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