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And I don't agree that spam should be legal, unless they're going to pay for my internet connection. The TV advertisers pay for everything except my TV (and cable or sattelite, but I don't mind paying for the additional services); if they'll pay for my connection, they can send me spam.

No, wait. If they pay for YOUR connection, they can send YOU spam. I don't want it, even if it's free.

See SpamGourmet. Does what you want it to do.

Houston's had free internet access in libraries for as long as I can remember. So what's so good about offering email?
The effort will (hopefully) involve an appropriately scaled public information campaign -- that's probably the only way to reach a good number of the city's residents who stand to benefit from email.
It's easy to say that the effort would work just as well if the promoted hotmail or yahoo, etc., but would that be appropriate? What if hotmail goes under (or gets hacked!) - as a Houston taxpayer, I don't want city employees providing free tech support for those services.
Now if the email is anything like the public works projects going on downtown, we're in big trouble (along the lines of 4,000 servers providing about 10 email accounts), but nevertheless, I think this is a good idea.Spam, we can just turn them on to Houston's spamgourmet :)

"Inside Internet Security" by Jeff Crume is a free book being given away by IBM that covers a lot of security topics in a really good way. They get into a lot of white-hat/black-hat discussion, which is sometimes really a distraction from talking about good policies, but it's still good overall. Get a free copy here instead of paying $30 for it, and you can even spamgourmet the address so you make sure you don't hear from them after signing up.

Remember, security is a process, not a package you buy in a store. The best tech won't help if someone is loaning their keychain with security keyfob to their girlfriend or lets their cousin use their corporate PPP account to browse the web from his home.

we had long talked about wiring Eliza into spamgourmet - which is perl already. Won't take long, now...

Why not chip in on the spamgourmet project so you can offer users disposable email addresses -- this definitely does kill a lot of spam per user.

Of course, using a good filtration service like spamgourmet immunizes you from all the activities. Besides being free, ad-free, (and spam free, for that matter), spamgourmet is pretty darned easy to use.

I got so sick of all the blurred definitions of opt in and opt out that disposable addresses started to make sense.

There's also a sourceforge project to make the software available to mail admins -- please step on over there if you have comments or would like to help out.

I wouldn't use a filtering service unless it was at least as easy as deleting spam -- this one's easier (IMHSBO in my humble somewhat biased opinion)

There is a heaven on earth...

Mr. Ska

I slit a sheet
A sheet I slit

There's also a new open source project to get this code out to mail administrators so that they, too can offer the spamgourmet service. If you run a mail server, please go the sourceforge discussion area for the spamgourmet project and put in your 2 cents.

And what is this about opting in and opting out, anyway? I think what we're seeing is that the email protocol is just too trusting and open-ended for the current net environment. I mean, lots of sites will tell you I 'opted in' to receive their junk and a bunch of others', and, if I don't believe it, I can go back and [find and] read the small print that was hovering closeby when I tried to download something or other. It would seem that we're constantly letting other people define 'consent to receive spam' for us.

Disposable email addresses are the way to go -- by this I don't mean a hotmail address or something like that, but, rather an address that is only good for x uses. My favorite site for this is www.spamgourmet.com (free and ad-free) because the addresses are created as used -- this means there's no maintenance on the site, and, theoretically, you'd never have to go back to the site unless you changed your forwarding address, or whatever. The psychology behind this is that taking control of my inbox away from the spammers has to be easier than receiving and deleting one piece of spam, and I have to perceive this fact at that critical moment when I'm signing up for something...

From the faq:
Q. How do I create a disposable email address?

A. First, set up an account here, if you haven't already, and save your real email address in the space provided (don't skip this important step!). Remember your username. Later, when you need a disposable email address, just think of a word (any combination of letters and numbers (20 characters max), provided you haven't used it before), and decide how many messages you want to receive at the new address. Then, put the word, the number, and your spamgourmet username together with dots to form the disposable address. For instance, if your Username is "spamcowboy", then you could make a disposable address like so:
someword.2.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
Then, you can use the address to sign up for your favorite spam-prone website, get a confirmation message, get your password in the second (and final) message, then smile and consider for a moment that no one, no-how is going to send you email with that address again.

Please note: This service summarily deletes any message that doesn't pass muster with the forwarding rules, rather than preserving it for future viewing -- I love this!, but you may prefer something that saves your spam -- you may have to put up with ads or small payments to accomodate the higher cost of saving the spam, though.

What I've been doing with the new registrars (and others) I've been dealing with is to sign up with a disposable spamgourmet email address (www.spamgourmet.com free and ad-free), then, after I've received some important email from them, I go back and 'permit' just the important addresses to keep sending me mail. Sure wish I had done this with NSI...

If you hate spam, use a good filtering service like www.spamgourmet.com... I sign up for goofy stuff all the time now, and haven't seen a spam increase (except on the ticker on that website...). With a site like ebay, you'd have to tweak the sender rules a bit to make sure the important messages got through, but, other than that, these services are actually getting easier to use than not.

www.spamgourmet.com"> check out this service if you'd like to keep signing up for spammy stuff but don't want the spam -- too bad there's no help for existing address proliferation

Now I think spamgourmet.com will accept mail from other domains, if the MX record for the domain points to the server, but I'm not sure. It'd be interesting to find out one way or the other, and/or to move the site to a server where it could...