Well, first of all let me assure you that i had no idea this service sends
junk mail to the _sender_ of the message.
Sorry ppl for any junk. I bailed out after my phone went off every 30
seconds and this annoying synth voice kept trying to pronounce subject lines
like "Unixeseseses [was: RE: The OMG/Microsoft battle gets a little
personal]".
Oh well...
On a brighter note, let me assure you that i haven't got any junk messages
on my phone yet, or to my mailbox and i can't really understand what or who
these people are making money off.
My dear friend Gil (Rimon) has made a slightly smarter application of this
service, by forwarding all mail sent to beeper@corky.net (on our mighty
Lee-nooks server) to his beeper. Quite cool.
Doron
-----Original Message-----
From: Rohit Khare <rohit@bordeaux.ics.uci.edu>
To: ernest@apple.com <ernest@apple.com>; FoRK@xent.ics.uci.edu
<FoRK@xent.ics.uci.edu>; resnick@interlog.com <resnick@interlog.com>
Date: 06/02/98 18:06
Subject: Re: MailPush confirmation of off-line e-mail notification
>
>> You must have got these too, yes? Can you FoRK an opinion?
>>
>> -- Ernie P.
>>
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>> From: "MailPush Support" <support@necs.co.il>
>> Date: Wed Feb 04 19:31:08 1998
>> To: Ernest Prabhakar<prabhaka@apple.com>
>> Subject: MailPush confirmation of off-line e-mail notification
>>
>> [dorons@mail.corky.net] Was notified of your e-mail message [Rhapsody =
>> Product Marketing Manager: the truth comes out]
>> By: Phone Call At: Wed Feb 04 19:31:08 1998
>>
>>
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>> Would you like to be notified off-line of new e-mail message ?
>> Sign up for FREE MailPush, which can do almost anything you like.
>> You'll never have to check for new mail in your mail box again.
>>
>> <attachment missing>http://www.mailpush.com
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>No, I've never heard of mailpush.com. Quite separately from whatever void
in
>Doron's social life might be driving him to be actively notified *any*
*time*
>*any* *FoRKpost* *is* *ever* *emitted*, I can imagine this service might
sill
>be useful. Let's tool over and have a look:
>
>: Would you like to be notified off-line of new e-mail message ?
>: Sign up for your FREE M@ilPush, which can do
>: almost anything you like. You'll never have to check for
>: new mail in your mail box again.
>
>Now, I've seen a lot of internet come-ons and scams in my time, but I've
never
>seen anything that
>
> 1) promised to do "anything you like", which begins with cleaning my desk
and
>taking dictation and goes downhill from there, ending up somewhere near
>"reinstall a fresh copy of Win95 every morning".
>
> 2) promised to filter my incoming mail to a manageable zero.
>
>[this page, by the way, deserves some kind of note as home of the first
hebrew
>banner ad gif I've ever seen. It has a nice US-ASCII smiley in the text, to
>boot. However, why isn't the Hebrew smiley (-: ? Ron? Oh, when we need Ron
the
>most... (actually, it's a fully bilingual site: english or herbrew)]
>
>It works only with the POP service of certain ISPs (about two dozen right
>now). Remember, right on the FIRST WELCOME SCREEN, you're supposed to
blindly
>hand over your POP account and password to this anonymous service, probably
>run by the Mossad.
>
>I don't know what networks support this, but it must support a 'fast dial
bip'
>to work with:
>
>: Signaling box
>: Plug it into the telephone socket - The on-line green led will blink.
Upon
>: receiving a new message, the red Led will blink. Upon receiving a message
in
>: which in the subject contains the word "chat", the yellow Led will blink.
>: Pushing the reset button will turn off the red or yellow Leds , and will
>: blink back the green led.
>
>I can only imagine putting this into the loop of Dan Kohn's
>cellphone-back-to-Seattle-back-to IP-back to SF-back to NJ-back to roaming
>ISP-back to VocalTec laptop-to Dave Crocker scenario.
>
>Or you can use the "Mailpush softwar". Which works with the Win95 dialer
to,
>um, dial up to the server every so often and check if you have new mail.
No,
>you are NOT allowed to ask me how this might be an improvement.
>
>It will, however, offer marginal utility by paging and/or allowing
voicemail
>access.
>
>It's a free service, which means I think they're also gonna be pagig with a
>lot of advertisements. But why stop there? I always wondered if advertising
>companies would want to do nano-sponsorship: free calls to Aunt Greta in
>Minnesota if we both agree to listen to 30-secong Proceter and Gamble radio
>ads at random intervals...
>
>And that's it. It's a two-page site. Nothing more to deconstruct.
>
>Rohit
>
>PS. Today in class, the Geneva-to-Geneva phone call example came in handy
to
>give lie to the meme "without computers, 2/3 of the population would have
to
>be telephone operators" -- one of the other revolutions that keeps the size
of
>the telecom sector in check (at about 3%!) is that *users* are now
operators:
>ever enter 25 digits to reach your vmail from abroad? That's work. Credit
to
>John L. King for the example.
>
>PPS. In another class, we discussed dynamic runtime optimization:
just-in-time
>compiliation, profiling, and re-compilation to acheive even higher
>efficiencies. One downside is that the machine code would never be stable:
new
>chips with extra caches, different clock speeds, etc, might trigger the
>adaptive system into writing completely different code, potentially
exposing
>latent bugs. I pointed out that this software on a Caltech asynchronous
>microprocessor could lead to self-modifying code that reacts to the outside
>temperature! Async procs react to cooling and level of drive voltage. So
with
>a lot of cache hits, the compiler might turn up the power to the cache to
>drive it faster. Or, you shoot the satellit into outerspace, and the code
>morphs because the functional units just got ridulously faster in the
vacuum
>of space...
>
>