strathspey@strathspey.org:45068

John Chambers

Re: International Dance Council - Final instructions

April 17, 2006, 10:49 p.m. (Message 45068, in reply to message 45062)

David (Toronto) commented:
| So much venom directed at the IDC/CID!
|
| My impression is that all the related e-mail I received  came  from
| the Strathspey server.
|
| I  doubt  that  Adamantia Angeli (what a great name!) would have my
| address - unless I were to contact her asking to remove me from her
| list!
|
| And she has a point - what are the problems? Does the International
| Dance Council exist legally?  Are they having a 20th World Congress
| on Dance Research? Did previously advertised events take place? Was
| anyone ripped off?

That may all be true, and the IDC may well be a perfectly  legitimate
(even  worthy) organization.  But none of that is relevant to why you
see people reacting with "Spam!" comments.

There are a million worthy organizations in the world.  If  each  one
were to send you just one worthy message each year, you'd get several
thousand worthy messages each day. Some of us are reaching that level
of  worthy  messages.  Most of us don't like it, no matter how worthy
each individual message may be.

What you're seeing is the widespread reaction to such messages by the
people who have been seriously impacted by such email messages.  Lots
of people have a strong reaction, even if the organization  has  sent
only   one  or  two  messages.   It's  because  of  all  those  other
organizations that have sent only one or two messages.

Fact is that the IDC's message to the list fits exactly  the  general
definition of "spam": an unsolicited mass mailing.  It doesn't matter
that the organization is legit.  It doesn't matter that the  contents
were  true.  It doesn't matter that the advertised events took place.
What matters is that it was an unsolicited mass mailing.  Such things
are bogging down a lot of people's mailboxes and making email soak up
far too much of our time.

We do see messages here from  SCD  groups  about  their  events,  and
nobody  objects.   Those  are  on-topic  here,  and were probably not
mass-mailed to a hundred other lists.  But the  IDC  messages  aren't
about  SCD.   They  are about general dance events, and were probably
sent to a lot more people than just this one  list.   It's  not  very
surprising  that people here would get upset and want to stop it from
happening again.


--
   _,
   O   John Chambers
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  /#\  in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, Earth
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