UNIX Reference Materials --- Product Announcement By SSC

[Mark Horton]

Personally, I get enough junk mail from lots of random sources that
I never gave my permission to sell my name for, that I don't mind
getting junk mail based on the Usenet directory.

I do want to emphasize that the purpose of the Usenet directory
is not for mailing lists, but so that we'll know (a) who is on
the net, and (b) who to contact when something breaks.  I've been
trying to track down the sites that are generating rejection
notices for net.announce the last few days, and about half of them
are sites that not only run the old buggy software (even though the
fix has been out for over 6 months) but also have not bothered to
announce themsleves, so I don't know who places like spuxll, ltuxa,
and symplex are.  Trying to track down the contact person for these
sites is hard because we have no info on them.  spuxll is even
harder because they get news from abnjh, another site for which
we have no information.  This is why it's important to have the
list and for it to be complete.

Obviously, SSC or any other generator of junk mail is obligated to
remove anybody from their list who requests it (I think this is a
USPS regulation.)  And since we do not intend the Usenet directory
to be used this way, we are not obligated to help them by marking
unwilling junk mail recipients in the master list.  (However, if there
is sentiment that such marks would be of overall benefit to Usenet,
we may consider it.)

What I'd like to know is: what is the sentiment
of Usenet on this issue - especially the netnews contacts to whom
such mail is directed (thus I've added net.news.adm to this list)?
Do you object to the Usenet directory (which is currently put into
the public domain each month) being used for product mailing lists?
What about other things (headhunters come to mind)?  Should we
include some kind of policy statement in the cover letter that
restricts the uses it can be put to?  Would it do any good?

	Mark