Nick Renton | Back Nick's response to my letter to the editor (edited to remove extra headers) Subject: back to the basics Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 11:49:14 +1000 From: Nick Renton I refer to Al Iverson's recent missive concerning myself (below). Just for the record, I did not send an advertisement. I was not trying to sell anything. I sent a copy of an article which I had written for a leading Australian newspaper and which I assumed would not have been seen by most people in the United States (although it is actually available on the newspaper's web site). I was sharing knowledge in the best traditions of the Internet. Furthermore, some common sense would not go astray. There is an enormous difference between * millions of identical commercial e-mails selling some product, sent out at random, and * a friendly one-off non-commercial message sent as an act of courtesy to a specific person who is known (not even just suspected) to be interested in a particular subject. Furthermore, I fail to see how 100 words sent to one person directly can cause more harm to that person than the same 100 words sent to a series of people including that person. On another aspect, minor irritations are an unfortunate fact of modern life. Nobody has mentioned the much greater nuisance caused by junk phone calls. These interruptions take up time and interfere with the called party's work. At least a junk e-mail can be trashed unread in less than a second, and at a time of day of the recipient's choosing. Returning to the main theme, if the actions of those propagating and using e-mail blacklists are legal then the time has surely come for the governments of the major nations to update their laws. After all, interference with snail mail is illegal in most jurisdictions. Kind regards ,-._|\ Nick Renton 194 Kilby Road East Kew 3102 Australia / Oz \ Telephone and Fax 613 9859 4958 [BH & AH] \_,--.x/ http://users.bigpond.net.au/renton/ v nrenton@bigpond.net.au