Re: Nostalgia, was [Exim] Delays send to AOL

From: "Dave C." <djc@???>

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Sanjeev "Ghane" Gupta wrote:
> > In 1988, it was quite common to _send_ mail to the postmaster, to ask
for
> > the address of a user, eg, to postmaster@???, for the address of a
> > Faculty Member.
> >
> > The success rate was high enough that this was the _first_ thing to try,
> > before attempting variations on firstname.lastname.
>
> These days, if you dont have someones email address, you probably have
> no business emailing them - if they wanted you to email them, they would
> have given you their email address, or have it published somewhere
> apropriate.

True. The specific cases were related to contacting Authors of Papers,
which had a postal address, but no email (or web!!)[1] address on the cover
sheet. If you had heard of email, you could wrangle a email account, and
try to reduce costs and time by communicating that way. Much as I remember,
in India, ringing up people to ask them their fax number in the early '90s.
Faxes were entering offices faster than business cards being reprinted.

[1] (Obligatory Nostalgia) Ah, I remember the days when Cambridge didn't
have a web site to its name. Those were the days. No bloody respect, kids
these days.

--
Sanjeev