Benny, how come you can send e-mails to this list and we can't reply to you in private? Every time I write you, the e-mail comes back to me undeliverable. Ruth Nerud baberuth@worldnet.att.net

On Mon, 9 Sep 2002 18:05:39 +0000 (UTC), baberuth@worldnet.att.net ("Ruth Nerud") wrote: >Benny, how come you can send e-mails to this list and we can't reply to you >in private? Every time I write you, the e-mail comes back to me >undeliverable. > >Ruth Nerud >baberuth@worldnet.att.net > I thought some nice gentleman explained all this several months ago, that is the difference between a mailing list and a usenet newsgroup. I guess not everybody got the message. A mailing list is something that one subscribes to. You send in your name and email address so that you can get all the messages others generate. You get them in your email program's in box. You become one of a number of people who's email address is on a list of email addresses and you receive all the messages; thus the name, mailing list. This thing you are tuned into as you read this is NOT a mailing list. It is a usenet newsgroup, one of several thousands which is called soc.genealogy.italian. Now, RootsWeb and perhaps some other giant, corporate internet entities who like to put their name on everything on the web that has anything to do with genealogy, have created a gateway or front end that can make good old soc.genealogy.italian look just like a mailing list. People send in their email addresses and then get all the messages that are gathered by RootsWeb's software and emailed out to individuals. A terrible waste of time and resources. However, there are still hundreds of thousands, if not more, people who read these messages the way god intended them to be read. Anybody can send a message to any newsgroup via news reader software. Anybody can read the messages in any newsgroup simply by pointing their news reader software to the particular newsgroup. It is one of if not the oldest form of communications dating back to the infancy of the internet. All of this goes to the very heart of your accusation that I'm a fraud. Basically, Ruth, we have two groups of people reading these messages. Group one, the folks who enter through RootsWeb thinking they are subscribed to a mailing list because they get the messages via email. Group two, and I do not mean this in a negative way, are perhaps a little more knowledgeable. They point their news readers at a particular newsgroup, see all the headers of all the messages, choose the ones they wish to read and download them. Much quicker, cleaner and it uses infinitely less web resources than a mailing list, but it does not have RootsWebs name on it. So, they had to make it look like a mailing list so they could plaster their name all over it. Now the first group goes merrily about it's business thinking, "Mailing list". Group two knows it's one of the newsgroups which are notorious for being the number one place that the big, professional junk emailers collect email addresses to bombard with junk mail. These people literally have software and hardware called mail bots (as in robots) that harvests email addresses for their use. Group two folks know to never publish their correct email address in their return address. Maybe, and this is considered optional, they might put a doctored version of their address in their signature with instructions on what to change if somebody actually had to email them. Never, never, never in the return address. All of that works for me because I see usenet and newgroups as a public forum, and if anyone has something for me they would not say publicly I'd really rather not even hear it. Benny Reb