OT: Re: [lug] Letting Bush do the Arithmetic... Burning Books in Baghdad

Jeffrey Siegal jbs at quiotix.com
Tue Apr 15 22:01:26 MDT 2003


Case Jones wrote:
> Everyone has an opinion, and I respect yours.  However, this is 
> non-commercial email, and it was clearly labeled OT:, so you had ample 
> opportunity to ignore it.  Anyone who decides to forward this 
> information widely will be drawing attention to a topic that in many 
> important locations has not been adequately covered.  'Chain mails' of 
> this nature were big problems in the early days of the Internet because 
> they caused massive infrastructure problems due to heavy email volume. 
> This is not true anymore today, as the Internet has been immunized by 
> automatic mass-mailers propagated by Outlook.

Non-commercial spam is still spam, as politicians, religious whackos and 
others who might want to plaster off-topic stuff everywhere should be 
reminded regularly.  The precious resource is not 
bandwidth/infrastructure, it is a the reader's time.  I don't find it 
very difficult to "ignore" *all* spam; almost all of it is readily 
identifyable by its subject header, prefix or not.  But I still want to 
remind people to respect the others' decisions to subscribe to a "linux" 
list, not a general interest politics one.  It is the sheer mass of 
people delivering their off-topic messages -- each of whom believes his 
or her message to be "valuable" -- that makes spam so hard to deal with.

If you knew if was OT than you shouldn't have posted it at all.   Post 
it where it is OT (on topic).







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