At 11:35 PM 2/5/97 -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>At 9:30 PM -0800 2/5/97, Brad Knowles wrote:
>> You can't just flat refuse to allow people who are in their fifty
>>hour trial period to send to the Internet, no matter what.
>> No, we have to find alternative solutions.
>How about -- while you're in your fifty hours, you can only send e-mail
>to one address at a time. No limits on the NUMBER of mails you can
>send, but only one address per mail. That solves the problem of signups
>sending thousands of spams (unless they want to do it the really hard
>way. I suppose you could automate it, but the upload time for 10,000
>separate emails would eat that 50 hours quickly....), and few of the
>legitimate users would notice the limitation or be seriously hurt by it.
That offers no protection from spammers, Chuq. They'd just have a
number of accounts that are sitting there waiting for their free
hours to run out, and then they'd use 'em when their time comes up.
This is no solution.
Besides, the "free hours" aren't really the spammer problems anyway.
Most spammers are making a large amount of money from gullible,
net-ignorant business people, and thus the difference between
"use AOL for free" and "use an ISP for $20" is nothing. If there
weren't a net connection company such as AOL giving out free
access, the spammers would just buy an account for $20 each time,
and consider that part of the cost of doing business.
We can't solve the spammer problem by such limits on new AOL
users; what AOL _can_ do for us is help us with the ignorant
types who don't understand what a mailing list is.
--
/\ /\ /\ /\ Kynn Bartlett / kynn@idyllmtn.com
/ \ / \/ \ / \ Idyll Mountain Internet
/ \ //\ /\ \ / \ <URL:http://www.idyllmtn.com/~kynn>
'_| _` // \/ \__\ '_| _` I finally updated my homepage!
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