Email, private or public?

What we have here in microcosm is the story of a new technology that has revolutionized communication but is showing the strains of its success. In much less than a lifetime we have gone from stamped envelopes to electronic mail. The difference is that junk mail is slow and relatively expensive, whereas email is fast and inexpensive. The spammers can send out hundreds of thousands of unwanted irritations in minutes, and we recipients have little recourse.

For this reason, there is widespread antipathy to anyone who even thinks about sending unsolicited emails of other than a private nature.

Mar Vista residents have the right to say, "I didn't give the MVCC permission to give out my email address, so they shouldn't." Even George Garrigues concedes politely that most of the email subscribers probably did not know that they were subjecting themselves to this possibility.

The Mar Vista council meets Tuesday night. Garrigues may be known to some readers here as the researcher behind Los Angeles in the 1900s, a website that has extracted news, illustrations and ads out of Los Angeles newspapers published between 1900-1909.