It occurs to me that the current post-Patriot Act terrorist war paranoia, where increasingly law enforcement agencies act as if private citizens have no right to privacy, might require Grex to change the way it conducts business. All the post-Patriot Act, War against Terrorism paranoia has gotten out of control, and as a result, places like Grex are more vulnerable than ever to being pressured by law enforcement agencies. In theory, Grex's staff should never, ever, invade the privacy of one of its users by accessing their email. Not to read themselves, as if it was part of being the cops of this system, or to give to outsiders to read. If the board is handed by a subpoena from a law firm, or any sort of pressure short of a court order, it should not allow anyone to read a user's email. But the problem seems to be that Grex lacks the monetary resources to adequately legally defend itself in these situations. Therefore Grex is particularly vulnerable to ANY legal pressure. Any subpoena has to be taken like a dire threat because Grex can't afford legal proceedings. Even if Grex was encrypting all of its email files, such that the only person who could read the email is the user, it wouldn't resolve the situation because staff can always be asked to re-set the user's password to access the files through the front door so to speak. Maybe the answer is to change the software so that when staff re-sets a password, it automatically bulk erases all that user's files. That would inconvenience any user who forgets his password, but how else could staff honestly tell law enforcement that it cannot in any way, shape or form access un-encrypted emails of its users? In this enviroment, and knowing that the post-Patriot Act paranoia is only get worse not better, knowing that the government is only going to get stricter and stricter in going after phishing that it sees as potentially terrorist related, you have to ask if its worth it? Is it worth it for Grex to continue to offer e-mail? This isn't like it was ten or twelve years ago, when there weren't a whole lot of places offering email, let alone FREE email. I can't believe that any user in this day and age actually needs Grex to have email. So is it necessary now? Is offering email worth putting the Board in the middle of legal/moral dilmenas, where they have to decide whether or whether or not to turn over some user's email to interested outside parties who have named it in court documents? Maybe its just time for Grex to stop offering email. Grex is/was supposed to be about the public conferencing anyway, not free email. I hate to think of a nice little site like Grex being on some FBI blacklist of sites where terrorists can get anonymous email accounts and funnel information. But you know that it is. I'm concerned that the current situation the board is dealing with is the foreshadowing of a lot of such situations Grex will be faced with in the future as the government gets more and more vigilant in its prosecution of anyone remotely connected with terrorism. I'm wondering how others feel? Is the time coming when Grex should just get out of the email business altogether?71 responses total.
I thought grex stopped offering email a while ago . . . . ;)
Aren't there a fair number of larger, more anonymous, places where a competent terrorist might get free e-mail? Places outside of the U.S. even, where the Feds might find it a touch less convenient to monitor or interfere?
Just one note of clarification: a subpoena *is* a court order. A lawyer may request it, but the court grants and issues it.
why don't you let those of us who want to use Grex for email use Grex for email. Don't decide for me that I need to be protected against evil law enforcement types. That paternalistic approach is -not- what Grex is about.
#2...the very fact that grex is small and its email is anonymous, lends itself to use by unsavory types. Sure ther are a fair number of larger, more anonymous places, but in this day and age, there are people who can't have enough email addresses. The more places email can be funnelled through, the harder it is to trace. I'd bet a large percentage of the email grex processes is simply mail going from point A to point E, and Grex is simply point B, C, or D. It is a stop along the line. Grex's size isn't nearly as important as the fact that email is anonymous and user logins can be generated anonymously. I'm just concerned about cases like what apparently happened at the last board meeting. Grex got a subpoena, which for a larger company would be no big deal, but for a place that has little or no resources to fight it, the board might be left feeling it has no choice but to cave and comply, no matter objectionable the request is. I'm just asking, is it worth it for the board to be put in this position, when grex doesn't have to offer email in the first place?
We don't have to offer any services. Conferencing is a risk in terms of liability and the potential to need legal services. We do the best we can for as long as we can and try not to overreact.
You are assuming email is the source of the problem. I'm not about to say whether it is or isn't (in this case), but it is only an assumption.
Richard - there is no "current situation". Grex responded to a subpoena, and we're done with it. I think you are correct that Grex email is probably attractive to people who want to do illegal things. It's attractive to a lot of other people too, of course.
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3MB in one day? My procmail filter gets 95% of my spam now. I sic it on viagra, v1agra, cial!s, in subject line and message body, to get rid of about half. Window.XP gets a lot of the rest, along with weightloss, hgh... Nobody ever offered me bigger breasts yet unless it was in the message body. Do you get the $300 computer with last year's components, special one-time limited-time offer? No monitor.
Some stuff isn't that easy to filter. Like all the emails claiming to be from Nigeria or Kenya or some African country, and they have millions in an american bank, and if you get it out, they'll split it with you scams. I've lost count of how many of those I've gotten.
Maybe I get very specialized spam. My .procmailrc is very small compared to many here and it catches all my junk ( well not 100% but pretty close)
I find the Nigerian fraud mail is so tightly patterned that it is very easy to filter into my fraud mailbox, where I can browse it at leisure and post copies to potifos.com/fraud Most annoying is the spam which is apparently encoded in such a way that the keywords are invisible to my filtering.
I filter on 'confidential' which catches most of the Nigeria spam.
re 9 I think you need all of those things, yes.
I'm hoping that Next Grex will expand e-mail services with POP or IMAP. Doing away with it would be a terrible mess. There would be too many change of address notices to send.
Who will be the tech support for NextGrex and who currently is the tech support?
Basically, the same folks doing the work now:
http://www.cyberspace.org/staffnote/
Jan has been doing the grunt-work of getting the new machine up.
re #18 #1 of 4: by S. Lynne Fremont (slynne) on Wed, Sep 22, 2004 (21:21): tod, I wish I could tell you what is going on with that. We are having some serious problems with staff time being lacking at the moment. The modem is very much appreciated by me at least. #2 of 4: by More Femme Please (mfp) on Wed, Sep 22, 2004 (22:29): hi, slynne!~ you're very much appreciated by me at least! #3 of 4: by Tod Wilkinson (tod) on Fri, Sep 24, 2004 (13:57): Thanks Lynne. Any consideration being done by the BoD on contracting a tech to fix Grex? (ala Mary Remmers suggestion at least a year ago) #4 of 4: by S. Lynne Fremont (slynne) on Fri, Sep 24, 2004 (20:25): I dont think that is something we can afford at this point, tod. So, the question is, what is being done to increase the amount of volunteers in the staff if there is such a shortage?
I'm open to suggestions, Tod.
Here's a few suggestions: Post an item asking for technical volunteers. Include a laundry list of tasks that technical volunteers could consider donating their time and expertise towards. Address technical concerns in the meetings and minutes and canvas for expert opinion and advice for solutions. Appoint someone on the BoD as the technical liason and hold them accountable for updates on finding new volunteers and ensuring they interface for knowledge exchange with current volunteers. Consider technical volunteer time as an asset and something that should be recorded by the corporation and duly rewarded with complimentary membership and recognition.
re #16, *expand* email services? Email isn't grex's core mission. There are too many places now that do email a lot better than grex does or can. Who even wants email these days at a place that has no bandwidth for graphics? If Grex expanded its email services, like say offering POP or other web based email, it could risk being overwhelmed by people who come here just for email. But I see both sides of the argument, the other being why should grex offer email at all if it isn't going to offer the best email service it possibly can. One option would be to have email, but limit OFFSITE email to members. All users could send email to other grex email addresses, which would keep the functionality of email as a tool to enhance the bbs experience. And if you become a member, then you would get to use your grex email to send email offsite.
Does that make membership a "pay for service" if you limit email to the paying few?
Several of our friends use grex for email and that is about the first thing they ever did with computers, and it got them interested. Same for me. Then I attempted the conferences, and so did some of our friends. It is no fun to learn email on a system where you can only talk to other users.
Never mind, that's just richard holding forth...
Re the last sentence of #24: It depends upon the size of the user base. MTS-only mail was quite useful.)
re #24 I agree. THe first thing people learn on M-Net or Grex is how to do the Internet e-mail.
I must be an exception, though I had email before I started Grex. I didn't even know Grex had email for a long time. My focus was on the discussion groups.
I suspect that these days, almost all Grex new users already have email. It's much less of a hook to get people onto Grex than it was, say, ten years ago.
right, and what also happens by grex offering email, is people running listservs and other mailing lists through their emails, participating in non-grex conferences instead of GREX conferences. If Grex's raison d'etre is its conferencing, email might not be helping at this point.
My grex mailbox is too small to use with a mail list and besides when I tried it the mail from there bounced because grex was so slow so I had to set up another account at sdf instead.
Would it be a storage / infrastructure problem if, on request - meaning that a user actually logged in and new how to use grex e-mail and to whom to send a request, an inbox size increase were granted, say in increments of 1M, or a one-time grant to 5M?
I use Grex for e-mail. I think we should stop trying to artificially limit what folks do with Grex, and that we should upgrade our e-mail to something modern.
I like pine and mutt and mail. Do you know of something better that is smaller and faster and text-only? What I would like is for someone to set up mutt to automatically convert attachments sent in WORD or RTF format.
If the PTB install wv, I can configure mutt to automatically use it for Word and RTF files.
Correction: I can provide the configuration file fragment to them that will get mutt to automatically use it; they would need to add it to the global muttrc file.
MH is the only way! It's so Unixy!
I have a copy of mutt set up to use catdoc for WORD and RTF. Are there precompiled versions of wv and/or catdoc for OpenBSD? Can you also use Pine this way?
wv is in the BSD ports collection. I don't know about pine; I haven't used it in years (since I switched to the more securely written mutt).
I am told for mutt use .mailcp to set up catdoc etc for viewing msword docs or rtf. application/msword catdoc %s application/html lynx %s I think you also set up the applications in .muttrc or somewhere. Jim, is there an xpdf for OpenBSD, or antiword or catdoc?
That's .mailcap -- the entry for msword docs is what you showed; for rtf docs it's application/rtf (application-name) %s (I use rtfreader as neither antiword nor wv handles RTF, just Word native formats. I've never installed catdoc; it might handle both.) You do also need to add a line to the .muttrc (or global muttrc) file for each MIME type you want to be viewed: # These type of attachements will be shown inline auto_view text/html auto_view application/msword auto_view application/octet-stream # Word documents frequently show as octet-stream instead of msword. auto_view application/rtf It will then look in the mailcap file to determine how to view the appropriate MIME type.
I am proposing that on NextGrex we install a regular, modern, e-mail program, with the capability of handling .doc, .pdf, and other attachments. I'm really tired of telling folks they can't send me this stuff at my Grex account, and have to use my Comcast account instead.
Actually, the reason I use Grex mail is so that I don't have to deal with those sorts of things. I have another account where family and friends can send attachments. Only family and friends have been given that address.
When you say "capable of handling" MS-Word and PDF documents, what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you want to be able to save attachments and download them to your local machine, or do you want a PDF viewer on Grex, or what?
Mutt can be set up to use a WORD convertor to automatically decode .doc attachments - antiword, catdoc (also does RTF), or wv will work. The new pine will automatically display html as text and go to URLs with lynx. There is a pdftotext program that could be compiled to deal with pdf files to extract the text parts of them. But generally .doc and .pdf files are so full of garbage (fonts, colors, tables) that they won't fit into a grex mailbox anyway. Can you train your friends to convert their .doc's to text before sending?
There can be no regular modern e-mail client programs on Grex. Everything that can reasonably be understood as a "regular modern" mail client, (eg, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird) needs a windowing systems to run on, so basically they have to run on the computer that is sitting on the desk in front of you, not on some far away server. Those programs do, however, have the capability of accessing mail stored on some other computer, using the POP or IMAP protocols. Right now Grex does not have a POP or IMAP server. Installing such a server on Grex would be very easy, technically speaking. With such a server, users could read their Grex mail using any client they have on their home computers. The argument in the past has been that we don't want people to do this, because we want them to log in to Grex to fetch their mail, increasing the chances that they will take advantage of other Grex services. Of course, now we have some Grex services, like conferencing via Backtalk, that don't exactly require logging into Grex. Another anti-POP argument has been that Grex doesn't want to offer first-class mail service because mail already eats up too much of our resources. One might consider allowing POP only for members. This would be very viable to do within Grex's resource limitations. However past philosophy has been to keep member perks to a minimum. Also under current policy an account is expired if there is not a telnet or backtalk login in 3 months. Would a POP login count too? The mail server software on Grex is sendmail (exim on nextGrex). These are very much regular and modern. Well old Grex's sendmail is a bit old. The mail client software on Grex all assumes that you don't have a GUI. Pine, mutt, etc. Most of these have the capability to save attachments as files. They do not, of course, have any very adequate ability to display things like pdf files or word documents. You'd have to download the files to your home system where you can use a GUI viewer to view them. Actually, it is theoretically possible to run GUI applications on Grex, using a X-windows client on your home computer and a server on Grex. I don't know much about this, but I think it would be slow, clumsy and useful to only a small set of users.
Maybe a better alternative would be to offer a web-based email client on Grex, something similar to squirrelmail. Users would be able to access their mail by going to a web page. It would be able to display any attachment that your browser can display.
Squirrelmail would be nice if the spam mail filtering plugin is enabled.
The word files people send me are just text with a lot of garbage added and could very well be displayed as text using a convertor. Same for rtf or excel. Joe already set pine up to display html using lynx.
Re: #46. Running X applications would be the other way around: the client (say, xman) would run on GREX and connect to the user's local display server (the thing that makes nice pictures on a monitor). Whether it would be "useful to only a small set of users" depends on where most of our users come from and whether that country has a lot of broadband take up. In the UK people are taking up broadband like there's no tomorrow. Having said that, I think that a webmail email client would be way better than the ability to run an X client. There are so many different things that might be run at a time that GREX might well crawl to a halt even if just using a few clients was relatively fast (remember that even today's standard wired ethernet connection is only just under twice as fast as what in the UK at least is standard domestic broadband Internet service - and that's about 5 times as fast as the networks X was originally designed to run over, (10BaseT Ethernet).
re 47:
Back to that "does that count" (pop3) issue, though.
However, I was unaware Backtalk counted anyway. Interesting.
I'd rethink the 'perk' part for pop3/imap and I'd have to wonder
if the vast number or email foo-foo would benefit from a webside
interface. These issues have been around awhile.
I like the idea of a web-based e-mail client on Grex! And I think it's time to change the philosophy of offering only crippled e-mail in the hope that people will go elsewhere for it. Remember - the number of our members seems to be declining. We should *not* want to send them elsewhere for anything we can reasonably provide.
I have to agree with dpc on this. If we can, it would be nice to have decent email. Web based would be good.
And staff can, will, and has the time to do such? Let's not overload our volunteers, okay?
Yeah. I guess I was figuring that would fall under "if we can"
The thing I like best about grex is that you can use pine, mutt, or mail, instead of wasting large amounts of time ploughing through webmail. D to delete instead of clicking on all the mails you want ot delete, then clicking ot confirm that and waiting 30 seconds. A friend just called asking for help figuring out how to delete his webmail. He says grex is much easier - D, Q, Y, and you are out.
Sindi, can't you simply accept that some people PREFER the GUI interface?
Re: #56. Or MH.
GUI interfaces are wonderful for a lot of things, but for some they're just not optimal. Which is probably why I do 95+% of my conferencing on Grex using Picospan, not Backtalk. And I don't think it's just because Backtalk is slower. A big part of it is that when I'm logged in via the TTY interface, I can switch back and forth between reading conferences, conversing in party, managing files, etc. An integrated environment. Not that I'm knocking Backtalk. It's a wonderful program. But a TTY interface can do some things that the web just isn't very good at. When it was founded back in 1991, Grex got into the email business (and, for a while, usenet as well) because we wanted an online community that provided free access to computer services that, at the time, were difficult to come by. Who had internet access in 1991? Not many. Nowadays, everybody has internet access. Email services abound, many of which are free. So why are we still in the email business? I guess because many members of the Grex community like using Grex for email. I guess because the tight integration of email into the Grex online environment offers value that commercial services like hotmail and yahoo don't have. If you "do" email while logged in, it's part of an integrated community environment that includes conversation, both time-shifted (bbs) and real-time (party). You don't get that with hotmail. We should definitely keep email. A web interface to email, integrated with Backtalk, would be a nice addition. As pointed out above, it could simplify such things as viewing attachments and serve as an attraction to new users who are uncomfortable (or perhaps totally unfamiliar) with a TTY style of interface. Keep in mind that somebody on staff would have to implement it, though. And we don't pay our staffers very well. I'd be opposed to offering POP or IMAP. It doesn't encourage community-building.
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Why would you set up a procmail filter to do that, when it's easier just to forward it to /dev/null?
What's wrong with squirrelmail running IMAP locally?
For anyone with an ISP, and thus an email address, Grex sort of offers POP service. You just have to use a .forward file. I checked a while back and most staff members do this. Didn't check the board. I do this so I don't give out my ISP mail address; it changes every time I change ISP's. Still it would be nice to be able to POP or IMAP Grex directly. Now that janc is an expert on NextGrex passwords, it might not be too hard to set it up so that POP and IMAP access didn't count toward keeping your id alive. This would discourage people from just using Grex for email. Of course there is and will be no way to prevent that.
What is wrong with using grex just for email? We have two friends who still use it that way. One even pays membership dues.
Excellent point, Sindi!
Nothing wrong with using Grex just for email. But given our limited resources and our stated mission, we have to be careful about attracting too much of such usage, which is what I'm afraid POP and IMAP support would do.
Indeed; using Grex just for email doesn't really coincide with the idea of a community. It would be like inviting someone to a party who will ignore all the other guests and talk on a cell phone the whole time.
re #67 Don't invite people if you want to control how they interact.
Re: #67 - The analogy is more like the bank of courtesy or pay phones you have in your location.
Our two friends use pine for email because they don't like POP mail (chance of viruses) or webmail (slow and hard to understand). One of them also has an ISP account and the other dropped hers. She is looking forward to using the newer PINE which lets you view URLs. I signed up with sdf.lonestar.org and looked briefly at their bboard (conferences) and went back to using just the mail, browsers (links2 is there, with javascript, which I hope to use soon at grex), and various other useful things like antiword and catdoc.
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