Russ Allbery wrote,
| To be fair to Paul's position there, the spam in question would be more
| like mailbombing. If there were a significant public contact address for
| the RBL team, don't you think that every vindictive spammer in existence
| would forge it as their return address, mailbomb it, mailbomb it by proxy
| from test autoresponders, put it on every address list, etc.? The ones
| who are doing this out of spite more than to make money in particular.
| I'd be very surprised if such an address stayed particularly useable for
| long.
Very good point, Russ, and good follow-through. Vixie said, however, that
such an address "would just get spammed," not that it would get mailbombed,
so I highly doubt that he thought it through as far as you did. The feeling
I got from his wording was that nothing in the universe was worth letting
a single slice of spam sully his server.
Mike Avery wrote,
> There are a number of shops on the net that provide free email. One that
> I've liked has been mailandnews.com. You can use them with POP3, IMAP, or
> web interfaces, and they are anti-spam.
> So... if you're stuck, surf over to www.mailandnews.com and setup
> an account.
Mike, you're giving a year 2000 answer to a 1995 problem. When this corres-
pondence took place, there were few such things as public webmail providers.
I personally knew of none, and I had no HTTP access anyway (except by dialing
into a shell account and using Lynx; ever try to use webmail through a text-
only browser?). "Surf over"? I couldn't get to the beach then, much less
out on the surf.
Also, at the time I had no POP3 nor SMTP capability on my own machine, so
public popmail providers, if any existed, would have been no help either.
But didn't you notice that I somehow managed to correspond with the RBL
people regardless? What helped was the account I had on another shell
provider, who wasn't on the RBL.
