On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 02:03:10AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
>
> I'm not going to change my practices for your sake, so if you ever need a
> private reply from me regarding something, you'll just have to cope with
> the consequences. I respect the right of individuals to /dev/null my mails
> for any reason they choose, be it the content, the originating IP address,
> or what-have-you. But I will not aid you in your endeavor to pretend these
> blacklists cause no collateral damage by trashing non-spam mails addressed
> to third parties who have no control over their (ISP's) mail server's
> configuration.
>
> The attitude of reckless blacklisters like yourself reminds me of the old
> saw about how to be a corrupt scientist: "If the data don't fit the curve,
> fake it."
>
> I will not be pushed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.
>
> And I most certainly will not voluntarily hand over my outbound emails to
> the tender mercies of my monopolistic ISP's mail hub.
>
> If they want to collate and scan my mails, they'll just have to do it the
> good old-fashioned underhanded way, which is sure to be blessed soon by the
> Fascist laws of my contry if it hasn't been already.
>
> The least they can do in the process is drop the pretense and intercept my
> outbound mails entirely, retransmitting them from one of your beloved
> non-blacklisted bureaucratic addresses.
>
> Until that day, I will maintain responsibility for my own SMTP
> transactions.
I fully agree.
On the flip side, I pay enough for a virtual Linux server hosted on a
spam-free network so that I have somewhere to run that SMTP server that
most of the world will still talk to, because I do, in fact, care that it
gets through. It is, in fact, not as much as one would think, but I will
refrain from flogging the service on a public list (if anyone wants to
know, I'm happy to answer privately, of course).
And I use RBLs on my inbound email, but only as a weighted advisory (IE,
SpamAssassin with RBL checks enabled). Because by damn if DULs don't
provide a strong heuristic for spam detection - especially since the few
folks who send from such that I care about hearing tend to write messages
that are easily flagged as non-spam based on content.
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU/kNetBSD(i386) porter : :' :
`. `'
http://nienna.lightbearer.com/ `-
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