January 19 2007 at 11:09 AM No score for this post
(Login Dick Gaines) Forum Owner from IP address 69.180.8.232
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Subject: Subscriber Alert from H-Net
To: H-WAR@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Dear H-Net subscribers:
A very serious situation has arisen in which many
(perhaps thousands)
of our subscribers are being deleted from our
lists due to filtering
technologies and policies being implemented by
major Internet Service
Providers, as well as some universities. It will
take a combined
effort by our subscribers and H-Net's management
to resolve the
situation. Please read the following message and
help us where you can:
Many of you know already that major internet
service providers have
installed very strong antispam filters at their
mail gateways and are
implementing stringent policies to block spam.
In most cases, all it
takes is a small percentage of recipients to mark
or complain about a
particular IP address of origin for the ISP to
block the relay of
messages from the offending IP range.
This issue has affected H-Net, even though our
subscribers by
definition voluntarily join our lists. AOL in
particular (including
its subsidiary netscape.net and cs.com) has begun
to block mail from
our node; we estimate that perhaps 6,000 of our
subscribers have AOL
addresses. The bounces from undelivered mail
eventually trigger
deletion from our subscription lists; hundreds of
subscribers are being
dropped from our rolls everyday.
We have tried to work with AOL to have them
recognize H-Net traffic as
legitimate but with no success so far; we will
keep trying to do
so. But AOL's policies for regaining entry to
its domain are
technically impossible for us to comply with and,
in some cases, raise
serious issues concerning free speech.
There are several options you pursue to help
assure the unfettered flow
of information from H-Net:
-- consider resubscribing to your lists from an
email address and node
outside of AOL or of the ISP that may be blocking
H-Net traffic.
-- if you normally do not save list postings,
then consider setting
your H-Net list subscriptions to NOMAIL to
suspend email postings to
you, then follow the list discussion via its
web-based logs, and when
you wish to participate feel free to post -- the
ISPs are only blocking
incoming, not outgoing mail to the list. All of
our lists display
their logs on the web; just bookmark the list's
home page and link to
the logs from there. You can also set up RSS
news feeds from your
favorite lists and follow them in any
RSS-compatible browser (Internet
Explorer 7 and Firefox do this). Visit http://www.h-net.org/about/rss.php for
information.
-- contact your service provider to protest the
interference with your
mail and to demand that access be restored.
Service providers do
listen to their customers.
-- please do not report mail from h-net.msu.edu
as spam or junk
mail. Instead, contact our help desk at
help@mail.h-net.msu.edu or use
our subscriber center to signoff lists you no
longer wish to
receive. If you have technical difficulties,
we'll be glad to help
you. Feel free to write me directly if these
methods are for some
reason not effective.
-- Please circulate this message to colleagues
who may already have
been affected by ISP spam blocking and would
otherwise not receive it.
If you are successful in getting your ISP to
relent, please write
directly to me at the address below; such
intelligence would be useful
in our ongoing campaign to bring down these
barriers.
We regret that the rage for security has gotten
to the point where
teachers, students, scholars, and professionals
must face such hurtles
to effective and free communications.
Thank you for your continued support of H-Net.
Sincerely,
Peter
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Dr. Peter Knupfer
Executive Director
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online
310 Auditorium Bldg
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
FAX: +517 355 8363
Voice: +517 432 5134
Email: peter@mail.h-net.msu.edu http://www.h-net.org
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Regards,
Janet G. Valentine, PhD
H-War Book Review Editor http://www.h-net.org/~war/
