Technical Note

The Messages Not Sent:
What Readers Avoided on the jESSE Listserv

Gretchen Whitney
Associate Professor
School of Information Sciences
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee

January 2003, r 27 January 03

jESSE, The Open Forum for Library and Information Science Education, was started in 1992 as a project by Charley Seavey and this author when we were at The University of Arizona. Electronic discussion lists were becoming popular on campus, and we were beginning to use them in support of classes and activities at the Graduate Library School. Library and information science education was beginning to experiment with a variety of mechanisms for electronic communication, and we wondered how this particular medium could be used as a tool for the LIS community. (1) In 1994, the management of the discussion moved to a University of Tennessee (Knoxville) server when this author joined the faculty there, and I assumed ownership of the list. The early archives of the list were lost in the move.

As with any new technology, its use went through fits and starts. jESSE (2) was initially a companion to ELEASAI, a listserv that was to focus on research, while jESSE focused on education. ELEASAI was to be tightly focused, jESSE was to be somewhat loose and include topics related to higher education in general, as the membership was so inclined. There was no moderation, simply a group consensus that certain topics were appropriate and others were not.

This technical note documents and describes the e-mail messages that were sent to the list, but were not distributed to the subscribers of the list. Most discourse analyses of electronic discussions concern themselves with the content of the discussion. (3) This note concerns itself with the messages that were NOT sent to subscribers. It is intended to give readers of this journal a "behind the scenes" peek into how the discussion group is run. And, this note is to lay the groundwork for future research in this area.

On the 19th of July, 1995, the list was inflicted with "a letter from Olga". On the 21st of August, the list settings were changed so that only subscribers could post to the list. In July of 1998 (4), jESSE became a moderated discussion list, in order to control spam and keep the discussion focused. This means that no message would be sent to subscribers without my approval. Limiting postings to the list by subscribers, the earlier control, was not successful, because spammers developed software that enabled them to subscribe to a list, spew, then unsubscribe. Owners of lists can see this churn because they are notified when someone subscribes, and when someone unsubscribes.

In November of 1998, for reasons explicable only by general curiosity, this author started saving messages that were not sent out on the jESSE listserv, rather than just deleting them. I was alarmed at the apparent proportion of advertising, administrative messages, and personal messages that were being sent to the list, and I was interested in examining these trends. I ended this data collection at the end of May 2002 because I was looking for a way to cease the frequent messages that I was receiving from our UNIX system that my account was overflowing with data, and the file of non-sent messages was a large file that was easy to target and conserve off-line. ( I will continue to collect messages, in a new cleaned-out folder.) It turns out that the "overflow" was being caused primarily by an increasing number of audio, advertising, and other messages at over 100K starting in February 2002, and increasing substantially in May of 2002. Most of these were in the 150K range, but one was 2.2 Megabytes, and was clearly spam. Admittedly, the data collection period is not logical (e.g. based on a calendar) and is based on personal needs. But, it provides us with a starting place for classification of the data.

Previous studies (5) have shown that three and a half years of data are not sufficient to assess and analyze long-term trends. In the assessment of MEDLINE, even six years were not sufficient, but twenty were. One could speculate that in the fast-moving arena of the internet, one might argue otherwise. Time will tell. But, again, it is a place to start.

I can separate messages intended for me personally from messages sent to the jESSE listserv because all messages intended for jESSE come to me with an extensive approval frame which says, in part, "This message was originally submitted by [e-mail address] to the JESSE list at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU." Only a few people send me personal messages regarding the operation of the jESSE listserv.

Categories

The 567 messages sent to jESSE explicitly (not to me personally) but not posted to the list were classified into 11 categories.

Advertisements (Adverts)
Advertisements for flowers, Chinese encyclopedias, healing herbs, acne medicines, insurance, how to spam millions, and the like. The category includes messages from Nigeria, South Africa, and other countries regarding financial assistance. These are clearly framed to attract sales. Sales messages from relevant industry participants (such as OCLC and Gale messages directed at educators) that are relevant are allowed through.

Irrelevant
Absent a good definition of pornography, this classification includes messages like "Here is my new web site with pictures from my party!!!" and other more expicit content. It also includes announcements of conferences and other content (e.g. Sojourns in Nature, teachers looking for help in k-12 work) not directly relevant to the subject scope of jESSE, broadly defined. These also include vaguely relevant postings such as ALA meeting announcements, which are appropriate in more targeted venues.

Personal
Personal messages addressed to an individual, usually the poster. Some invite the entire jESSE readership to lunch, others are a wail or rant, others request a document mentioned by an individual from the entire readership, others offer congratulations to colleagues or other personal comments. They are clearly not intended for general discussion. At times, however, such as the 2002 discussion of School Library Journal, messages addressed to an individual are passed through because they seem to move the discussion forward, or, the original poster intended general discussion. In most cases, the message is "returned" to the poster asking if they really want it sent to the entire group.

Messages to Me
These are personal messages addressed to me as an individual using the listserv address rather than my personal address. Sometimes they are expressions of appreciation, questions about the listserv, apologies, and the like.

Unclassed
These messages are those that did not fall well into another category. One example is a series of messages by a single author that were sent in answer to a specific problem. The last in the series summed everything up, and pointed to a web site with a comprehensive answer. Only the last was submitted to the list. Another is a set that delved deeply into the work of Woody Allen. Another was a post that had to do with the space-time continuum. I asked the poster to make it relevant to LIS, because it was (in terms of physics) an interesting question. He could not (but he sort of tried). It did not get posted. My favorite is a very sweet message from a poster who thought that jESSE was an actor in a television soap opera.

Relevant but Unknown
A series of messages that on the face of it, appear relevant, but, they were classed as "nojESSE" at the time of receipt. Most of these appear to be messages that were sent to Society discussion groups that I belong to, which I forwarded to jESSE, yet, then turned up as direct submissions and duplicates.

Empty
Messages simply repeated the previous post, but included no original content. I just find this an interesting abberation of listserv use.

Gibberish
These message were not readable by PINE. PINE is a text-based e-mail client, and does not cope at all with attachments that are improperly formed, graphics files, audio files, and basically items that are not pure text. They are rendered in gibberish by this e-mail client. It is discussion group policy that attachments and other bandwidth-intense items are not accepted. All posters who have attempted to post relevant materials in an un-readable format have been requested to provide an alternative, and all have done so. Advertisements appearing as gibberish are classed as advertising.

Administrative problems
Primarily subscribe and unsubscribe messages.

Fishing
Messages from students who don't want to use the library, and see the list as a mechanism for getting others to do their homework for them. Or, more importantly, they have not adequately researched discussion groups to discover which would be the most appropriate forum for their query, and queried the list administrator as to how to formulate their question for best response. Several did provide a proper preparation, and their queries were posted.

Snow White
There is a persistent repeating message from "HaHaSexyFun" that involves Snow White, the Seven Dwarves, and what I assume to be a pornographic image (which is not viewable in PINE). I was bombarded with it (13 occurrences) in 2001 and decided to track it because it was so frequent. I suspect that I am being bombarded with similar messages from Korea and other countries, but the character set being used does not readily map to PINE's and I can't tell what is in it. These messages are in the "gibberish" category.

The Non-Sent Messages

Table 1 presents the number of messages sent and not sent to the jESSE listserv. There is no good explanation for why non-sent messages were such a low proportion of messages for 2000 - the heaviest year of traffic. It is interesting, however , that the range of the differences for the other years is only 3 percentage points (19-22).

Table 1
Messages Sent and Not Sent to jESSE

Table 2 presents the numerical distribution of messages in their categories. None of the categories are particularly large or onerous - the largest is "personal messages" - messages sent to other posters in response to a query , and advertising.. Fewer "empty" messages is heartening. Fewer administrative messages - subscribe and unsubscribe usually - is also heartening. These were a serious problem early in the life of the list although that assertion is made from memory.

Table 3 shows the proportion of non-sent messages for each year. The largest proportion in 1998-99 was "personal messages" at 40%. The honor shifts, however to advertisements in 2002 with 29%. Anecdotal evidence suggests that advertising has increased in personal e-mail boxes, and this demonstrates that lists are not immune to it.

Discussion and Conclusion

Taken together the data suggest that jESSE readers may be becoming more comfortable with the electronic environment of discussions. That is, there are fewer personal postings. In part these data also reflect the practice of moderation - posters have become sensitized to replying to requests for information via private e-mail when requested to do so. And when a discussion gets going, the conversation gets lively.

The amount of "junk" e-mail is on the rise. We sense this in our mailboxes; this documents the fact for the list. Others have as well - see the Postini Statistics from the ISP EMCS. Paul Wouters in New Zealand tracks and graphs the personal spam he receives. The SpamCon Foundation maintains a variety of statistics and other resources on spam and electronic mail. Conducting a search on Google for "spam statistics" reveals pages from ISPs indicating the number of spams blocked for customers each day, spam blockers, personal accounts of spam, lists of top spammers (names, addresses, domains), and much more.

Why does jESSE receive so much junk? I don't know. The fact that e-mail addresses are so easily acquired does not explain why this infection seems to so badly affect jESSE - they're not directed at individuals, the messages are directed at the list. Many lists have their own web sites, so they are equally exposed on that front. jESSE is a relatively old listserv in net years, however EXLIBRIS (http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/exlibris/) is a year or so older, so both have been considerably exposed. SIGMETRICS (http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html), a Virtual Special Interest Group for ASIS&T, resides on the same server as jESSE, and I am the owner. I have not seen a single irrelevant posting to it since it began in June of 1999 - nearly three years ago - and it is not moderated. I entered jESSE into directories of groups as soon as those directories were available in the early 1990s. Is this the future of electronic discussion groups? I do hope not.

One possible explanation is a combination of the size of the readership (over 1000 individuals), and the fact that jESSE is a person's name. These would be attractive attributes of a target. (6) We can name other large lists that do not suffer from spam, but they have names like Web4Lib and PACS-L (with 10,000 subscribers). We can also name smaller lists, like SIS530, with fewer than 50 subscribers, which was spammed into submission. But, the name and the size are the most likely culprits.

Arriving between the first of June 2002 and the 23rd of January, there are 391 messages in the current "not posted" folder. If this rate continues, the number of messages not sent will be five times the number of messages for the previous calendar year (670 vs. 136).

Both the discussion groups for the ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Information Architecture (http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/index.php) and EXLIBRIS () have recently considered issues of moderation because of ad hominem attacks, general disarray, and straying from the topic at hand. And the sentiment in both groups was to not moderate the discussions. Not, however, because of spam.

I don't like the idea of moderation - so many interpret that as censorship. And it can be confusing as a reader to send a message to the list and not see it appear. It is a historical accident that the default for subscriptions was set to just return an acknowledgement , rather than a copy of the sender's own message. Such settings are changed when a subscriber's record is examined.

But unmoderated, this list would have drowned.

What of the future? Moderation will stay. The amount of spam dictates that in the name of preserving the list and community itself. I could additionally require that all new subscriptions come through me personally. But the problem is, given the way that the listserv software works, the moderator has the choice between closed postings (moderation), or closed subscribing. And the latter limits the reader's flexibility of posting and reading from multiple accounts. jESSE is "out there" - there's no way to pull the genie back into the bottle.

Stay tuned for updates on traffic reports.

Notes