Curt writes:

> I have a question that I know someone can answer for me, and may start a
>  thread that will last all week long.
>
>  I have been asked to find a list of companies that have HP3000's to send a
>  brochure/e-mail out to.  Is there a list of members of this list?  Is HP or
>  Interex the only places to get/purchase a list like this?  If there is a
>  list of subscribers to this list, is it a big NO NO to send out e-mail?

Let me do my best not to be curt. Rather, let me be frank, Curt.

E-mail advertisements have become the single irritant that tends to rile my
dander more than about anything else.

All companies need to advertise, but junk mail and junk faxes have become
exceedingly preferable to me nowadays when they're compared to junk e-mail or
direct phone call solicitations. I read the advertisements that come to me in
those manners. Occasionally, they're actually informative and I get something
out of them. But even under the worse possible circumstances, they don't
consume a lot of my time.

As to mailing to this list, you clearly don't need a list of members. Your
posting has already gone to everyone on both the HP3000-L list and the
comp.sys.hp.mpe newsgroup. Short plugs have been agreed to be perfectly
welcome; long-form advertisements have been traditionally frowned upon.

What does rile me is when someone (recruiters especially) go through and
harvest the names of the common posters from this list and then begin e-
mailing me solicitations directly. As each new solicitation comes in, I put
their domain name in the reject list and reject all further e-mail from them
automatically. As this reject list has grown to several hundred domain names,
I'm now rejecting perfectly legitimate mail from honest correspondents who
happen to share the same domain name with some turkey -- but I'm willing to do
that rather than be bothered with all of the nonsense.

Secondly, the reason that I post to this list from an AOL account rather than
our true business domain name is because this list is gated to a newsgroup,
where names can be harvested at will. AOL has reasonable spam filtering in
place -- and I don't want all of the crap that I get here in my AOL account in
our business e-mail.

I have begun to believe that the only way that spam will disappear is if every
outgoing e-mail carries with it a charge (say, 5 cents) so that the spam
generators can't continue to do what they do without some substantial economic
penalty.

Wirt ("frank, but never curt") Atmar