Re: Question for Chris/Off-topic

> With reference to "the evil egroups.com (aka findmail.com) are you talking
> about the internet companies that do databanking and track everyone's e-mail 
> who crosses over into/onto their sites? I saw news special on double.click who 
> does just that. Sorry to be off-topic, just curious on this.

Sorry to perpetuate off-topic messages, but it's my list, so blttth!  :P

Seriously, I shouldn't have included my feelings towards egroups.com, but
I did, so I guess I'm committed to explaining things.  But in the interests
of preserving some semblance of order here on the list, *please* send
any responses directly to me (lindsey@mallorn.com).

Anyhow, findmail.com was a domain that egroups.com was using to harvest
mail messages from various mailing lists.  They would subscribe to a 
mailing list without contacting the listowner, start archiving the list
at their site, then place ads on the messages in the archives.  Of course,
the people who actually ran the lists weren't too thrilled with this
parasitic behavior, so many ended up blocking findmail.com email (as 
did I). 

For example, I run the official MHonArc mailing list at NCSA (MHonArc is
a program that can be used to archive email messages in a Web-aware 
format).  egroups.com has never asked permission to archive this list, 
yet they have an archive up at

   http://www.egroups.com/list/mhonarc/info.html

(although they have really old subscription information listed).  

No doubt some of you remember a similar fiasco between myself and several
horticultural lists in February 1997.  I was archiving some lists that I
subscribed to for personal use within Mallorn, but the archives were 
accidentally made public because of a server misconfiguration.  The 
difference is that I pulled the archives as soon as I were notified,
nor did I ever intend to make money from the listings.  We still only
archive lists if a listowner requests it.

But I'm digressing here...  egroups.com claimed that their archives were
"fair use" and that the listowner was notified by the act of subscribing --
if a listowner didn't want a list archived, they shouldn't have allowed 
the archiving account to subscribe.  Looking over the aforementioned 
MHonArc list, I count 4 addresses subscribed with the word 'archive'
in them.  The findmail account is 'ListSaver-of-mhonarc@FindMail.COM'.

Now that egroups.com is merging with onelist.com, I'm not sure what to
think.  I've always thought that onelist tried to do The Right Thing, but
egroups.com is a bottom-feeder.

Chris
Ye Olde Listowner

P.S.  Remember, personal comments should only go to me!  Don't reply
      to this message -- send comments to lindsey@mallorn.com

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