----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Anderson
To: ; ; ;
mironov@microsoft.com ; ;
Cc:
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 10:15 PM
Subject: as a human rights activist and an author seeking literary
representation....
sending multiple emails is part of my daily existence....
I just read that Bill Gates is planning a monetary method of keeping spam
from being distributed. As a human rights activist/author I am concerned
about this. Sometimes I send a few hundred emails in a day to publicly
posted email addresses and email addresses for public figures, literary
agents and
journalists. If there's a per email charge my meager income is depleted.
This means that I can't send human rights actions/concepts to journalists
and lawmakers, nor can I send emails to the wide variety of literary agents
it takes to find representation for an avant-garde work. I hope if you
continue in this course of action you make sure the threshold is above 10 to
15k emails a day so that human rights activists/lobbyists such as myself are
not penalized for our work.
Another way to limit spam would be to provide a 'report spam' button that
instantly sends spam email addresses to the Federal Trade Commission. This
keeps
email a free method of communication, and allows such servers as Yahoo
and Hotmail to be used by college students instead of having the internet
services of a campus banned from using email because they get charged for
it, which means that when I'm writing a term paper, I can write a
journalist for sources instead of being concerned that my internet
privileges will be revoked. As much as spam sucks, a surcharge for email
sucks more. Two solutions: one -- a high threshold (at least 10k per day...
I've sent out 700 emails to journalists and representatives of a number of
states in one day a number of times when it involves people getting killed
by a totalitarian state such as Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, or China), two --
a report spam button that sends the spam to a governmental agency and blocks
the sender all with one click.
I hope you can see how being able to send a large number (although not a
ridiculously large number) of emails can be useful for humanitarian reasons
and for non-commercial reasons. Remember that most people aren't that
savvy on numbers, they just hear that email will cost money, and
suddenly college students can't write academic and journalistic sources.
Please, don't feed that kind of frenzy, it will limit the avenues of
communication
available to the non-abusive user of email.
cheers!
Doc
p.s. i've seen representatives of the states Iraq, China, Afghanistan, and
Israel go to ridiculous lengths to try and stop emails from activists.
Please don't give people who murder people for sport hope that they can shut
down human rights activists.
p.p.s. if you need a marketing concept, call it a 'one-click' solution for
spam.
I hereby relinquish all intellectual properties suggested or referred to in
this email, a crosspost to prove veracity has been sent to the newsgroup
alt.business. - Kevin Anderson 1/24/2004
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