Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 19:08:23 +1000 From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: dsentelskids@yahoo.com Subject: Re: World wide email project, please help. Message-ID: <20010503190823.H220@welearn.com.au> In-Reply-To: <20010503094435.A77195@lpt.ens.fr>; from rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in on Thu, May 03, 2001 at 09:44:35AM %2B0200 References: <3AF03D60.15FFEDBC@dobox.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20010502182806.046ac670@localhost> <20010503094435.A77195@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 09:44:35AM +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Brett Glass said on May 2, 2001 at 18:35:48: > > At 11:01 AM 5/2/2001, Wes Peters wrote: > > > > >This is a real project, not a hoax. > > > > Many chain letters that were not intended to be circulated in perpetuity > > have gotten out of control. They've continued to make the rounds for > > years afterward, consuming bandwidth and making sysadmins miserable. (See > > http://urbanlegends.about.com/.) To start another is very ill-advised, > > I agree. And a lot of internet users (perhaps the majority today) > are still very trusting of all email they receive, which makes > the problem worse. I refuse to forward this, or any other mail which > says "please forward to everyone you know". If you feel that strongly about it, why not take the opportunity to _educate_ when people are trying to learn? Note the cc. Any objection on my part is irrelevant, because chain letters used for any purpose and sent by any means, including by email, are illegal in Australia. Many people don't know, or don't care, but theoretically it would be illegal for me to ask someone to forward an email to all their friends, or to forward one myself, no matter how worthy the cause. (I live in Gosford near Sydney.) Now if someone over here, or in some country where they cut heads off for every little naughtiness, reads such an email and obeys it in ignorance, who's gonna feel all guilty about it? Who will suffer? The well intentioned sender. That's why it is _particularly_ important _not_ to do mass forwards of email for worthy causes. This is a very educational project, and I applaud the teacher for taking it on. One of the big lessons is that when you try to learn one thing, you often end up learning something better. And many others, such as conversational use of ">" quotes in email. We have a lot to learn from this too, like how to prevent undesired behaviour by correcting someone gently from their side of the fence and offering guidance to move in the better direction, rather than criticising among ourselves without offering the courtesy of feedback. If you don't like what someone does because of ignorance, unless you try to help them to feel comfortable about doing it right you're as guilty as them. As a group we've been working on learning that one for years. I think we've made the point about not forwarding uninvited emails to groups of email addresses. Hopefully their email access hasn't been cut off for spamming yet. There's nothing stopping any of us as individuals either responding kindly to the original request for a "Hello from Sydney" style email, or asking a more remote friend if they'd care to do so, or even shutting up and forgetting about it. -- Regards, -*Sue*- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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