On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 14:11, rm wrote: > It's of course their right to block whatever they want, but I too believe it to > be both poor business and ineffective spam control. Aol lost 1 million subscribers > in the > last 6 months, and are projected to lose another 1 million in the next 6 months. > They must be doing something wrong. >
I have to say something here. While I have never subscribed to AOL I have an inkling of what it must be like to have such a large network. I remember being in Raliegh at the linux conference a few years ago right after aol bought netscape. One of the speakers was a netscape exec who had been given some title like chief techology officer or some such thing and I will never forget the comment that he made. To paraphrase: "I know guys who are really great technologists and are pretty smug about designing and maintaining a network that has tens of thousands of users. I got my first glimpse into a real network in my first aol meeting after the merger and they were talking about TEN MILLION simultaneous users of the network. Do not be fooled, these guys know what they are doing." Of course that speaks to the technical expertise and not the business side :) I think one could postulate that spam is the bane of the internet user and if AOL can work with other ISPs to take an aggressive stance to eliminate as much of it as possible I say more power to them. Perhaps the AOL marketing dept decided that spam was one of the primary reasons folks were leaving and THAT is the reason for the aggressive stance. If they can reduce each users spam count by 1 per day that is approx 30 Million emails a day that don't have to get processed by the system and probably saves a couple of man years. Hmmm lets look: assumption: each spam mail takes 30 seconds of user time - DLing reading deleting, etc. 30M /2 - 15 million man minutes 15M man minutes/1440 minutes/day = 10416 man days 10416 man days /365 days / year = 28.5 man years saved for each spam message not sent to all users. Agressive spam prevention seems like a laudable goal when I see it in those terms. Not sure why I got on this rabbit trail sorry for the wasted time but sense I wrote it, I am going to send it. Bret -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
