This Week's Letters

A. H. WHITE
Norwell

Fighting Junk E-Mail

Thank you for Neil Swidey's informative "Spambusters" (October 5). Readers may also be interested in the Internet white paper "Drowning in Sewage," by David Harris -- in particular, how important it is for any regulatory legislation to require the user to opt in to receive junk e-mail. Aside from the nuisance involved, if one gets the spam and has to unsubscribe, this gives away the fact that this is indeed one's e-mail address.

MARY PHILLPOTTS
Leominster

I enjoyed the article about the war on spam, but its failure to mention so-called pink contracts was a major omission. Spam always has two sources -- the spammer initiating the message and the Internet service provider making it possible for him to send it. A pink contract (from the color of edible Spam) is a special deal cut between an ISP and a spammer that exempts the spammer from the usual terms-of-service ban against spamming. In return, the ISP gets a hefty fee that's often well beyond what it can charge its more legitimate users.

Too often, articles such as this one sympathetically discuss the fight that service providers like AOL wage against incoming spam, without addressing how much they themselves contribute to the problem through pink contracts, open relays (think money laundering, only with e-mail), and a lack of responsiveness to complaints about their own abusing users.

KIM MALO
Allston

I am sure that Barry Shein of Brookline's The World is sincerely frustrated by dealing with oceans of spam. But if his pioneering public Internet service is indeed losing subscribers, it may well be that his spam-fighting efforts are themselves to blame.

I'm a relative newcomer to The World, having joined up in late 1992 (there are still subscribers around who've been with Shein since the very beginning, three years earlier), but I'm not alone in being frustrated by a spam-busting system that Shein implemented several years ago without notification to his subscribers.

While the amount of spam that gets through has declined very little, I and many other World users discovered that an alarming amount of legitimate mail was being returned to its senders with no explanation to us or to them. Unlike most other Internet service providers, including the one I now use for e-mail, The World neither gives its subscribers any way to turn off its spam filter nor any explanation of the filtering system it uses.

The spam problem certainly needs a solution, but the one Shein and The World have implemented isn't it.

SCOTT FYBUSH
Rochester, New York

Ethiopian Jews and Israel

Charles A. Radin ("Waiting for the Promised Land," September 28) suggests that tiny Israel open its doors to thousands of Ethiopians who recently claimed their Jewish heritage. Israel already took in 6,000 persecuted "Jewish" Ethiopians in 2000 when no other country would offer them a haven.

Radin should also suggest that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yasser Arafat, and the Palestinians open their doors to millions of poverty-stricken Sudanese and Nigerians who follow Islam. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also expelled 300,000 Palestinians who should be allowed to return.

SUZIE S. MUELLER
Framingham

The lesson of the refugee ship St. Louis should not be forgotten, and one of Charles Radin's sources, Joseph Feit, was wise to bring it up. But the facts shouldn't be forgotten, either. Radin describes it as a refugee ship "whose passengers were sent to their deaths in Nazi-occupied Europe because no country would accept them."

That simplifies history a bit. The refugees were denied entry by Cuba and the United States, yet they were accepted by England and the Low Countries in the summer of 1939; France, Belgium, and the Netherlands would not fall under Nazi occupation for a year. At best, this could have been perceived at the time as an "uncertain fate" -- much as Feit fears for the Ethiopians.

JON GARFUNKEL
Brookline

The Pajama Game

Regarding women's pajamas and the need for comfortable attire at work ("Loosen Up, Ladies," September 28), nurses and other medical staff have the answer: scrubs. They are as comfortable as pajamas, affordable, and a timeless style.

KATHI EDGER
Hampton, New Hampshire