Okay, massive disclaimer here. I work for Mail.Com, formerly iName.
I could, in fact, be called its postmaster.
On behalf of the company, I will say this: our customer service
department is dedicated and hardworking, but in any service group
things will sometimes be accidentally overlooked or dropped. The phone
numbers in our NIC records, the phone book and in our media kit will
connect you to real, live human beings if you feel that an issue has been
overlooked or not responded to in a timely fashion. We strive to be a good
neighbor on the net, and believe that in general we achieve that, and we
WANT to hear from you if you see differently.
I believe that you have simply been unlucky in the amount of
time it took to have the problem fixed. There are over five
million iName users -- we are not a small company and it is
possible for it to take some time to respond to requests. We
generally meet a 5-hour turnaround on most customer-service
issues -- you have my apologies on our behalf that this took
so much longer.
I have located the account causing you the problem and de-activated
it. You should see a more indicative bounce message shortly.
And that's it for the company. From here on down, I'm speaking
for myself:
In the immortal words of Thomas Gramstad ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
>
> 2. The subscriber's account at ISP 2 is closed, and address 2
> produces error messages to the list manager. No clue to address 1
> can be easily identified, but ISP 1 can be identified from the
> headers or contents of the error message.
This has been a general problem for list managers (myself included)
since the first mailing list was created. Several mailing list
managers include features to help deal with it, and two MTAs (qmail
and postfix) implement Variable Envelope Response Paths to solve
the problem permanently.
> I have received no answer to my request, copyed below. Meanwhile,
> I continue to receive error messages. Since it is your (now
> defunct) user that is causing these error messages, it is your
> responsibility to help stop these error messages by providing
> the information that I asked for. I will not spend any more time
> writing more requests to you. Instead, I will simply forward all
> error messages I receive to you, until I get the infomation I need
> to stop them. This message, therefore, is a notification to you
> that you will receive such error messages, until that time.
While I sympathize with your frustration in not getting an
immediate response, I think its safe to say that threats of
annoyance/harassment are IN GENERAL a good way to get one's
request -- however otherwise reasonable -- taken less seriously.
> As far as I'm concerned, iname.com is guilty of spamming if they
> don't do anything with such cases (and I'm sure they are common).
I doubt you could get get very many people to consider this
to be spamming. A bounce message, however annoying, is not
unsolicited mail -- it is part and parcel of the entire SMTP
mail process. At worst, you could call this negligence, but
I do not believe that this problem is significantly worst for
iName than for any service which offers large number of email
accounts.
We would like to be proactive in checking for "dangling" forwarding
accounts, but there are difficult privacy issues involved with
that -- if we sent all of our forwarding customers a "test" message
every month, they'd probably start to get annoyed with us quickly,
and these days few or no mail servers implement the EXPN or VRFY
commands, so we can't use those...
> At the very least I think that this behavior, or non-behavior as
> the case may be, qualifies for blacklisting.
Honestly, this is silly. The forwarding problem has existed
since long before iName or any other free email service, and
going five days without hearing a response to a postmaster mail,
while aggravating, is hardly in itself reason to do anything
more drastic than, say, block out a domain locally.
Yours,
-Nathan J. Mehl
speaking for himself
------------------------------------------------------------<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." (PKD)
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