someone that Skip Brott didn't attribute wrote:
Why is it my responsibility as a holder of a valid email address to accept
mail from anyone who wants to send me the mail? As the owner of the email
address or, as the admin of the domain's mail server, I have no obligation
to
accept your mail at all.
Obligations should be on the sender.
You are correct that you have no obligation to accept email from me (nor
anyone else for that matter), the issue of "obligations upon the sender"
depends on which obligations you're talking about, and which sender
you're talking about.
If I'm replying to a question you asked, then you are the _original_
sender, and no, it is not my obligation to jump through your C/R hoops
in order to get the answer to you. If you want the answer to your
question, it's YOUR obligation to make sure you can receive my answer.
If I didn't send the message at all, but this is backscatter, then it is
your obligation to prevent backscatter to innocent bystanders. It's not
my obligation to deal with your challenge messages, and it's entirely my
digression as to whether or not I'm going to report you to a blacklist
for producing backscatter. At that point, it becomes YOUR obligation to
get yourself off of a blacklist.
Further, I as the sender have no obligation to participate in your
anti-spam mechanism. It's YOUR mechanism. You feed it, you configure
it, your CPU cycles are spent on it. I have no obligation to
participate in the program you use for deciding "is this spam or not".
I have no obligation to devote my time and my CPU cycles to your
anti-spam program. It's rather rude for you to assume otherwise.
