NONE: Re: email or quality information?
Re: email or quality information?
Peter Hartley (hartley_at_shop.hartley.on.ca)
Sun, 07 Jul 1996 00:51:56 -0400
At 11:15 PM 06-07-96 -0500, Cliff Kurtzman wrote:
>If someone sends me a direct snail mail piece, they have to pay for
>writing, printing, postage and the mailing list. It probably comes to more
>than a doller per item of snail mail. To put an ad on my car requires
>printing the ad and hiring someone to distribute it, which is less
>expensive but still costly for large distributions.
>
>Doing a direct mass email is nearly free for the sender. You have to put
>some time and effort and maybe buy some inexpensive software to grab your
>email addresses, but after that initial investment you can spam away at
>virtually no cost but a bit of your time.
>
>The cost of a doller per snail mail ad prevents 10,000 businesses from
>snail mailing me an ad each day. Only those that feel I am a target worth
>spending that dollar on will mail me an ad, and they won't do it very
>frequently unless I respond. That keeps my junk snail mail level
>manageable.
>
I am very uncomfortable with this position. In effect you are saying that
if someone uses obsolete and expensive technology to communicate with you,
then it is acceptable, while if they use modern and relatively inexpensive
technology to achieve the same result then it is not acceptable.
This position doesn't seem to sit very well with operating this list or even
your contributing to the exchanges on it - should we devalue your input
because you did not make your contribution on a clay tablet, delivered by a
runner wearing a loin-cloth and carrying a cleft stick? ;-) Of course not!
>If it becomes more acceptable to send out unsolicited email ads, there is
>no similar mechanism to keep the level manageable. It will go exponential,
>just like many other aspects of the net have. If I go in to the office
>each day and need to sort through thousands of email ads just to get to my
>business correspondence, then I will no longer be able to use the Net to do
>my job. This is why I and so many others feel so strongly about this
>subject.
>
But surely this is far less annoying than having to sift through the average
half a ton of junk mail delivered to your snail-mail address each year. At
least you can dump it with a mouse-click, no trees are consumed, the amount
of pollution created is minimal compared with that produced to generate the
paper, inks and the transportation of the junk to your letterbox.
>If a company sends me or my staff an unsolicited email ad, my company will
>refuse to patronize their company. Every purchase request in my company
>must be signed by me, and I have a long memory. It does not matter if the
>ad was mass emailed or sent "individually." By sending me an unsolicited
>ad, they have demonstrated that 1) they don't have a clue about the
>Internet culture;
One of the many wonderful things about humanity is that it and its cultures
are ever changing. We do not any longer, in general, roast cats in baskets
over slow fires or burn people at the stake because they happen to have a
"suspicious" mole on their body. ARPANET is history. The bbs-to-bbs by-phone
transmission of usenet, hopefully will die soon - more recent and more
efficient technologies await their application to this relatively simple
task. Government subsidies of the Internet are FINISHED - commercialization
is a fact - domain name registration and two-yearly re-registration to
finance backbone nameservers is now a fact of life. Indeed I suggest that
without commercialization the Internet will eventually wither and die.
>or 2) they do understand the Internet culture but decided
>to be rude and offensive anyway. In either event, I don't want to do
>business with them.
>
This is, of course, entirely your perrogative, and, possibly your loss.
With such a pedantic position on this you will probably never know.
Peter Hartley.
aka THE BotMaster
hartley_at_shop.hartley.on.ca
botmaster_at_mars.hartley.on.ca
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