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Journalists Are From Mars, IT Managers From Venus

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Costly war

8/4/2002 5:50:11 AM
Posted By: Rick Brown

Here's an Associated Press article about the topic that cleared this weekend:

Unsolicited, unwanted e-mail: A costly war of attrition

http://newstribune.com/stories/080402/bus_0804020016.asp

A deeper degree of online censorship

8/3/2002 3:23:34 PM
Posted By: Marcelo Soares

In the south of Brazil, IT people at the daily Correio do Povo cut virtually all the access to the internet at the newsroom. The excuse for doing so was the threat of viruses to infect the network - one year ago, one of the computers got Nimda and the paper nearly didn't get to be printed that night. Some months before, IT people had cut the newsroom's access to webmail services like Yahoo and Hotmail. Then, they cut the access to all the pages at Yahoo/Geocities (don't ask me why). The next step, after the Nimda struck, was to cut the access to the internet from the journalists' computers. Two weeks after the cutting, they decided to put in the newsroom a computer out of the network, designed to provide access to the internet. People has to stand to access it, and wait in the line to do so. One of the editors calls it "drive-thru". All the editors tried to change the situation, with no success so far.

Send comments to me at msoaresds@terra.com.br, please.

Filtering

8/3/2002 4:16:01 AM
Posted By: Rick Brown

One more thought. Many folks already know this, but for those who don't, it's important to note a technical
distinction in types of filtering: The kind that one controls on one's own e-mail software and the kind
that the Internet Service Provider controls. The personal filter does not address the cluttering of network bandwidth
with spam that the ISP filtering attempts to address. ISP filtering is deleting mail before it uses the resources
to reach the recipient(s). The personal filter simply transfers a piece of mail, after it has already hogged
the ISP's bandwidth to get to its destination, to one's own trash folder, automating the recipient's deletion
process.

Filters okay for "official" mail account

8/2/2002 1:17:22 AM
Posted By: Angshuman Das

As a former journalist (I worked as a copy editor and online producer on Indian and US newspapers), I understand Steve's indignation at spam filters that sometimes weed out legitimate mail. But, spam has grown to such demonic proportions that it seems that filters for at least "official" mail accounts (those that are provided by the employer) are a necessity.
It's the age-old conflict between freedom of speech and security concerns.

I am saying this from personal experience. I work as a Web designer at a software company. Over the past coupla months I have been getting so much mass mailing of the unmentionable kind (peppered with "P" and "V' words) in my official mail inbox that I have created my own filters provided in my mail browser, Outlook Express 6.0. You can do this, too, by highlighting the message in the message panel and then choosing Message > Create rule from message ... from the toolbar.

Not Just Spam Blocked

8/2/2002 12:56:57 AM
Posted By: Jeanette Paul

While I was able to read this article on spam blocking and censure, I was not allowed access to an article, located in the right-hand bar of the Poynter weblog (within which that article appears), titled Sex and Newspaper Ads. Or something like that. I can't check it out for accuracy anymore because after clicking on it, it's just been deleted! Who could have done this? Hotmail???

Finite resources at the root?

8/1/2002 11:33:05 PM
Posted By: Rick Brown

Here's an angle that isn't being addressed while we're trashing the IT personnel. Why do the IT folks
even care? Do they simply like messing with people's mail? Is it merely an institutional prejudice
against spam? I doubt it. It's my conjecture, based on a layman's understanding of e-mail systems,
that the root of the problem is that these systems are inadequate to handle the growing amounts of
bulk mail and huge file sizes that users, especially commercial interests, want to put into the
pipeline. If I'm correct, how can costs be allocated fairly to support an improved infrastructure? Charges
based on size and volume? Even if such charges were implemented, how could freeloaders be stopped
from hacking the system to send unsolicted bulk mail?

If the resources are indeed finite in the way that I suspect, there is another way to ration them without
prejudice. Make no attempt to filter and let the system drop mail randomly as it suffers under the strain.
No one would be happy, but at least that would be "fair." Otherwise, we need to understand the IT
problems involved when we propose solutions.

Spam Prevention Software

8/1/2002 2:54:11 PM
Posted By: Jeff Domansky

Seems to me the best solution to respect free speech and individual rights - is for IT experts to provide specific address-blocking solutions which the individual receiving spam can easily and fairly implement. It is always going to be difficult to block professional spammers but let's err on the side of the lesser evil.

IT Admin Is Right

8/1/2002 1:24:00 PM
Posted By: Alex Salkever

If your inbox is like mine, you get loads and loads of spam with bad words. Most of those you can ignore immediately due to their suspect subject lines. If you set up a system where the spam filter is sending you notifications, I submit that you will end up checking through more unwanted mail than before, at least if the subject lines are not very clearly stated and sender address not visible (which is common in spam programs) in your inbox. By this, I mean visible from your mail browser without having to open the actual receipt notice. Second, even if you are able to read these receipts properly for subject line and sender address, you will still end up doing *the same* amount of reading of spam as you were doing before. Which means you haven't solved anything. Eventually, we have to trust the programs and figure out ways ourselves to work around them.

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