December 20, 2,000
Why From England

Had one of those incredible internet exchanges this morning that shows how fantastic this technology is! I've been emailing English newspapers with the word of Joseph Smith's ascension. I was checking to see if one had come back because I wasn't sure of the address, when I noticed a reply that said "WHY?" all in capital letters, so I opened it. It said "Why are you sending us this foolishness? Even if this was true what would it matter to anyone in England? This is rather silly." I thought for a moment, clicked reply to sender, and managed to type "You have Mormons in England, don't you?" which is pretty good, for me, considering I can barely spell my own name, and sent it back. A few minutes later I checked the mail again and found a message that said "Re: Re: WHY?" Expecting another obnoxious comment I opened it and was rather surprised. It said "Er..yes! Rather sorry about that. Of course! We'll pass your comments on the the proper person. Don't know if we'll use it, but it will be considered. My apologies!"
Isn't it incredible? This exchange took all of perhaps four minutes. Can you imagine how long such an exchange would've taken just a few years ago with air mail letters? Don't even want to think about it! But here we were able to get the news to someone in England virtually instantaneousliy. The internet is a marvel. Let's keep fighting to keep it free! Let's not let the government start taxing it, and pricing it out of the common peoples' reach. This is the best thing we've had going in ages.
Another small problem that we've been running into lately that we think is rather silly; we are getting a lot of non delivery notices with no email addresses on them, no way of knowing who we are sending them to! Because many newspapers use the same servers. This is really perplexing as we hate to keep sending messages to useless addresses! We have only started receiving such notices lately, and wondered why servers have changed their policy. And another little problem. We received a request the other day from a newspaper editor asking us to remove him from our mailing list, and all the email showed was the word Editor. As we have dozens of emails beginning with editor, we had to email back to the person, asking them for their full address, which we promptly removed from our mailing list and simultaneously had the person's name removed from The Book Of Life in The Kingdom Of God. We are running into this problem again and again. People ask to be removed from our list and send no address and then seem rather surprised that we can't identify them. Some of them seem to think they're the only publications on the internet!
Came across an English newspaper that had a resident psychic who answered peoples' questions about the Afterlife. Have been trying to get that type of thing going here in The United States for years without success. Maybe I ought to start telling foolish lies that people want to hear, instead of the truth. Might make a little bit of money that way.

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