response 26 of 164:

Jul 31 11:03 UTC 1997

Obviously Grex is not very good "value" for the paying members, so it 
must be the community service we support.  Email is a load but it is 
also the most important service to the community.  We *are* A charity, 
after all.

response 28 of 164:

Jul 31 17:46 UTC 1997

Personally, the less open Grex is, the less I like it.  I *like* providing
free email to 16,000 people. It makes me feel that I'm doing something useful
with my time and money, as well as learning a lot.  I don't think Grex is
suffering from giving away email.  Conferencing is good, as far as I'm
concerned.  I conference just as much as I did a year ago, and two years ago,
and there is as much for me to do as there was then.  If I get a little more
time, as I have recently, there's more for me to do.  Case in point, I
recently joined, for the first time, the music cf. I don't think email load
is killing Grex.  I wouldn't mind seeing Grex faster, but not at the expense
of one of the things I like about it.

response 30 of 164:

Jul 31 19:14 UTC 1997

   Yes, I know that--but I'm talking about Grex being a charity in
the sense that we give things away, not in the legal/IRS/whatever
which we may, or may not align with.  Sorry, I didn't express myself
well enough.

   Marcus ignored the technical part of this proposal, but issues
regarding the technical side have been gnawing at me, while driving
to work.  The more I thought about it the more nearly impossible
it looks.

   Anything that has an entry in the password file (/etc/passwd)
can receive mail, as well as anything in the master alises file 
(/etc/aliases).  To prevent someone from sending mail completely
is reletively easy.  To allow some to use mail for particular
destinations would mean altering sendmail itself, such that 
a particular person, if on some list would be able to send 
"local" mail only.  At first glance, this sounds easy: look
for an "@" and if you see it then deny the mail, since it
uses a domain name and presumabely is offsite.  However, an
illicit mailing list of one person, on another account with
one line in a .forward file would allow anyone to send mail
out to a particular person anywhere on the net, and would
bypass our system of checking.  As long as the account that
held the .forward file was a member, any number of people
could use the .forward to point where they'd like mail to go:
just permit the file 777 (read/write/execute to the whole world)
and poof, an instant system of getting around our "local"
mail policy for non-members, in the outbound direction.

The inbound direction presents horrors of its own.  Every
time a piece of mail starts coming into Grex, sendmail would
have to look the user up and determine if its allowed to get
mail, accept it if so, or bounce it if not.  Given that the
newuser program would still be running (at least I hope it is)
we would have a never ending stream of people getting accounts
here not realizing that they can't accpet mail, and causing
mail to come to Grex, making for a never ending stream of
bounce messages all over the place.  Grex will be "loved"
by a lot of people for that.

All in all, it *is* possible to achieve this, but at great
cost.  Cost in terms of staff time to implement something
truely strange, staff time to deal with pissed system
admins all over the world.  The worst cost would be the
abandoning of one of Grex's best principals, that of giving
people access to email.

response 32 of 164:

Jul 31 20:16 UTC 1997

I'll actualy vote just to vote no to this.

response 34 of 164:

Jul 31 21:31 UTC 1997

I grant you, Dave, that some people may be doing slimy things with 
their access to e-mail on GREX.  But I don't think it's 
a) the most common reason for getting an account on GREX or 
b) any of our business unless it disrupts our system or breaks a law.

I think GREX is a popular e-mail provider because we have a cool 
address, because we're out there providing free email in a form that 
doesn't require fancy software, and because people have heard of us.

Quite a few of our best people came here originally for the free local 
email.  They've gone on to fancier providers in some cases, but they're 
still here in our community, contributing interesting ideas, and in some 
cases money and technical skills.

It's true that not everyone who uses GREX for e-mail will bother to 
become a member of our community.  Why should they?  We may not be all 
that interesting to them nor them to us.  So?  

I'd like to see the conferences grow ever more active, but I'm a lot 
more concerned with quality than with quantity.  That goes for 
memberships, too.  I'd far rather give a little more myself to support 
GREX than see a whole rash of memberships bought under mistaken 
assumptions about what membership in GREX means.

response 36 of 164:

Aug 1 04:29 UTC 1997

Re #30: we give things away...in the legal/IRS/whatever, STeve. We are
given donations, and we give away communication resources that we buy with
those donations. I guess I don't understand the distinction you are
making.  Grex is as charitable as any other charitable organization,
within IRS regulations. 

response 38 of 164:

Aug 1 05:46 UTC 1997

STeve, I think you are still confused. Grex does not have 501(C)(3) status,
but that only means that people can't treat their donations as tax-deductible.

That is a separate question from whether we are a charity.

In my opinion we will be granted the status, if we only apply for it.
Even if not, it will be because of some technicality, not because we are not
a charity.

I would like to find something else to use as a carrot to encourage
memberships. I don't think memberships are tainted for having been motivated
by some kind of carrot. I don't think e-mail should be it, though.
So I don't really like dpc's proposal here.

response 42 of 164:

Aug 1 16:44 UTC 1997

Re #39: I disagree that conferencing on Grex is in "a serious
decline". And be that as it may, it is not clear that enacting
this proposal would do one thing to improve it. If anything, I
would expect the reverse.

response 44 of 164:

Aug 1 17:15 UTC 1997

I have been reading agora for years, and I have just as much (read way too
much) interesting stuff to follow as I did then.  I see less items, but then
I see very few items saying "help" because we aren't dumping newbies into
agora.  I also fail to see how this would improve conferencing.  I don't find
it too slow.  Granted, I dial in, not come in over the telnet connection, but
we will have a faster net connection in a month.  I guess I just fail to see
what we gain by this, at all.  I do see what we lose, tho.

response 46 of 164:

Aug 1 22:03 UTC 1997

If we limit mail, then chances are that new people will be hard to come by,
and agora will just become the same people batting the same ideas around
season after season.. nothing new.  Our current format encourages new users
to participate, whether they pay or not.  

response 48 of 164:

Aug 2 00:03 UTC 1997

Regarding the technical stuff, STeve says we'd have to worry about
"inbound" mail.  In a sense, that's not really a problem, because dpc's
proposal allows inbound mail just fine to local users, just not outbound
mail.  We already have a significant # of people who fetch their mail
via "ftp".  Those people won't be at all fazed by a restriction on
outgoing mail.

In another sense, however, that doesn't "really" make the problem go
away, because there are a lot of ways to originate mail on grex, and
we'd have to be very careful in distinguishing between mail that truely
was originated remotely, and mail that was originated locally.  Some of
the ways mail could be originated include:
        telnet localhost smtp
        telnet 152.160.30.1 smtp
        /usr/lib/sendmail -bs
        /usr/lib/sendmail
        mhmail
        pine
        elm
        mail
Accompanying the mail are also a relatively complicated set of
addresses, including the forward & return paths, & various addresses
contained within the mail itself.  The logical place to implement dpc's
proposal would of course be inside sendmail - in fact, there's a routine
"checkcompat" that would seem to be the place where such a check would
need to be implemented.  However, the problem is that this routine
doesn't really have enough information to provide a robust authorization
check.  As STeve also points out, .forward files would make the whole
process that much more complicated.  Dealing properly with error
notifications would also be very difficult, if not impossible.

I would not care to argue that a mailing list on sexual fetishes, or an
AIDS support list, is any less valuable than a mailing list on golf, or
a mailing list for fans of Odo.  This is, after all, people's private
mail, and personal business, that we're talking about here.  The
important thing to remember here is not the specific reasons people
might choose to do mail here rather than in some more convenient place,
but that those reasons exist, and that they can be very powerful reasons
- reasons that will drive a significant fraction of our population to
find very creative solutions to their needs, if we don't provide for
them.  I do think, however, that we *can* meet the reasonable e-mail
needs of most of our users, and that there is real value in doing so.
In a sense, e-mail is just as much about people communicating with one
another as is computer conferencing, and it would be highly hypocritical
of us to try to get out of the e-mail business.