Roger Stern replied to the survey message:

> From: rsternjr@halcyon.com (Roger Stern)
> To: MMD Survey <mmdsvy@foxtail.com>
>
> Maybe it would be best for Jody to mention this survey in the MMD as
> an authorized activity.  Although I'm sure it's legitimate, it comes
> across like a tricky way to get name and telephone and address
> information to use or sell for marketing purposes.  In any case,
> Jody has all this for me from a previous submittal.


Roger, Thanks for the suggestion.  Yes, the survey that was sent out
today from the address "mmdsvy@foxtail.com" was legitimate.

As an active participant on the Internet for many years, several of
my e-mail addresses have been "harvested" by bulk mail packages.  I
receive a lot of junk mail.  Some of the junk mail received by foxtail
doesn't have valid a valid user name because the harvesting program
was broken.  Some of the replies can't be delivered because the
senders deliberately use bogus return addresses (i.e. they
intentionally forge a bogus e-mail header).

As the mail administrator of foxtail, these undeliverable messages
cost me time and real money (ISDN telephone connect time), as the
foxtail computer tries repeatedly to resolve the IP address to which
the mail is delivered.

I won't promise to never put a paid advertisement into the Digest or
onto the web site, but I won't share the mailing list or other contact
information with others.  Period ! (I've been asked).

Because the e-mail addresses of posters to the Digest appear in the
Digest, its probably impossible for us to prevent those people's
e-mail addresses from being harvested by someone, although I'm open to
suggestions on how to make it harder for it to happen by a "robot"
Doctoring the e-mail addresses with an extra letters comes to mind:

     kravitz@foxtail.com  -->  kravitzxx@foxtailxx.com
or:  kravitz@foxtail.com  -->  kravitz.no_spam@foxtail.no_spam.com


This, unfortunately, increases the likelihood that someone trying to
send a private reply to a Digest poster will end up with a garbled
address.

I'm interested in suggestions.

Jody Kravitz
Mechanical Music Digest