[Mailman-Users] Recent AOL thread

[Brad Knowles]

At 6:59 AM -0700 2004-10-21, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

>  But whenever AOL acts up for me and users complain, I always tell them
>  the same thing -- to move to a competent ISP.

	I was telling people the same thing, even when I still worked 
there and before my attitude towards them soured with greater 
experience.

	They are a mass-market monstrous-scale service provider and the 
kinds of rules that apply to normal ISPs can't really be applied to 
them.  If you need the kinds of things that a normal ISP can/should 
be able to provide, then AOL is not the place to be.

>  And they've done a horrible job of teaching their users how to use the
>  system.

	Yup.

>           I finally got tired of constantly getting bogus spam reports
>  and feeling like AOL was making me responsible for teaching their users
>  how to use the system -- instead, I tell them to move to a competent
>  ISP instead....

	I've been trying to get my wife off AOL for years.  She used to 
complain that it had all her "favourites" and address book entries, 
and when I showed her how she could migrate them to another program, 
she said that people knew her by that address for years, and she 
couldn't afford to give it up.

	Some people, regardless of how intelligent they are, just won't 
move no matter how much you try to help them, or how much they would 
benefit by being somewhere else.

>  I've given up trying to fix AOL's problems for them. They're just not
>  worth the hassle to me any more.

	I tried very hard to fix AOL's problems during the time I worked 
there.  I got tired of carrying the whole company on my back, and 
that's the principle reason why I left.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.