brian@meganet.net (Brian Wallingford) writes:
Ultimately, the problem is that the idealism which was more or less the rule a decade ago has taken a backseat to commercialism ...
i dunno about that. i see a lot of idealism still. volunteers at spamhaus, and within the da/mwp community, and at cymru, are still going quite strong. and in an odd twist of fate's knife, i still hold the "cix.net" domain which was very quiet until COX went into the internet business a few years back. since "i" and "o" are adjacent in qwertyland, i get a whole lotta misdirected e-mail, including a lot of 1x1 correspondance from folks who mistyped their source-email-address in their e-mail reader and then proceeded to correspond. rather than bounce it all, i answer it with the following template: there is no such person here at cix.net. try cox.net. re: and then i include-all the mail they sent to me by mistake. eventually i got tired of explaining to the senders why "paul@vix.com" was answering their e-mail, and so i started forging the source of my response to be the cix.net address they were trying to reach. i've got it all down to a couple of MH-E keystrokes and macros and e-lisp functions now. i just don't like the idea of bouncing the stuff outright, since a lot of the senders will never guess what went wrong. (i also appreciate the extra spam, for robot-training use.) it's only a dozen messages a day, on average, and thus: idealism isn't dead. -- Paul Vixie