Obviously there are quite a number of clueless people at PayPal, starting with Peter Thiel. I haven't lost any money there, but I ran into their basic stupidity when I merely tried to close my PayPal account. A broken web page said to send email to a certain address to report problems. An auto-response from there said to use the web page to send a message. It was the broken one. Duh.
Supposedly that might be a stolen credit card. In any event, if the charges are reversed on you, you have to be able to bring legal action against whoever made the payment (assuming you give the money back to PayPal, which I'm assuming you won't be doing, so this is all academic talk). If PayPal tries to contact you again, see if they are willing to provide you with that legal information (they should be able to get it from the credit card company that reversed the charges on them). When people reverse credit card charges, they can get this information and pursue conventional legal civil action (complicated in your case by the trans-national aspects).
Also check your credit report in case they try to stick it on there as an unpaid debt. That kind of thing happens.
You can see PayPal's S-1 IPO filing here [1851943 bytes]. I haven't looked through it, yet, but from some other places I've heard it actually looks bad. Go see for yourself for the real truth.
This is probably because of extreme arrogance on the part of management. I read somewhere (trying to find it) where some manager was quoted that they had reduced the staff answering phones not to save money, but to discourage people from complaining. When I merely tried to close my PayPal account so I would no longer be spammed by them, I ran into many roadblocks, including a broken web server (I eventually figured out what was broken, but so far no one there seems to care), and auto-mail responses that direct you to a web page that fails and directs you back to the mail address that gives that auto-mail response. That's the kind of stupidity that goes on there.
I wonder if Arthur Andersen will be doing their audits (now that they went public, someone has to).
No, but that's life and that's what pays the bills. Boo Hoo You don't like your job at NASA... Suck it up and deal with it, or move on, because there sure as hell is someone else out there that will do your job, and probably for lesser money.
Quite possibly for a lot less money, and quite possibly trapped in that job under threat of having to leave the US and go back to their home country if they complain. And they certainly can't shop around for a better job even if there were any.
Managers are bad in general because they can get away with it. What? The programming staff thinks they're incompetent and leaves? Hire someone else. In these days when jobs are scarce (despite false industry claims that the shortage continues), managers don't have to satisfy their underlings; they have to satisfy their own boss, or it might be them out on the street. This is one of the reasons why so many companies totally suck, but it's all about brown-nosing, and never about doing good work.
That's standard lawyer scare tactics. There should be a law against it, but how to make such a law and not have it impede lawyers when you really need them to protect a legitimate violation, I'm not sure. Maybe assigning a cost to the threat itself, and if the threatener loses, they have to pay that as well. Of course lawyers would oppose such a law, so don't expect it to happen.
At least AOL will attempt to do something about spam originating there. They may not be able to prevent it the first time around, but once they cut that leecher off (using the 1000 free hours) they at least have a CC number they can store in a DB (hopefully as an MD5 checksum) to compare against to prevent another signup with the same number.
I don't know that it's 95%, but certainly a lot does. There are dregs in every population, and the USA is no exception. The problem is, because China hosts so many open relays, the USA spammers can bounce through there to evade the blacklisting that has been placed on them already. The end result is to block the USA spammers I still have to put in filters with Chinese IP addresses.
I almost, but never quite did, cut off all of Russia. The spam problem there has gone back down, at least for my regularly spammed email addresses. OTOH, I'm seeing a rise in spam from Indonesia, though not even near a need to cut off the country, yet.
IM2000 has its own risks. It allows "institutional spammers" (those who actually spam with their real identity) to not only save more money by dynamically generating your spam when you pick it up, but also track your mail reading habits as well. They know you picked up the mail, and they know where you were when you did (if you didn't use a proxy). IM2000 doesn't stop spam; it just gives you a better identity of who sent it, and tries to shift the cost back to them. But you can be sure they won't be storing a million copies of the very same spam, but instead will have one copy for all, and eventually add Java programming to make it all dynamic.
What if the IP address does not have a domain, or that domain is forged (e.g. forward DNS lookup fails to match). The contents (header, body) can all be forged, so that can't be used. The only thing one can be sure of is if they do reverse-the-forward DNS on the connecting server, then at least they know the domain of the server.
Actually, I don't accept mail from servers without proper reverse DNS that matches the IP address via forward. And that has cut out a massive amount of spam, globally and domestically. And with extremely little collateral damage (it's easy to fix the problem, and 4 out of 5 ISPs affected have fixed it).
If it were not for the fact that other "more surgical" techniques actually work to stifle spam injected at.com, I might join you in blocking the whole thing. The thing about the.com spam is you can:
Complain about an open relay and it usually gets closed or cut off.
Complain about a direct (dialup, DSL) mailer and they usually get terminated.
Block statically IP'd spamhaus space.
The problem with the spam from China and Korea is that these methods are ineffective. Virtually all spam from C/K is from dialup, DSL, or broadband, or via open relays (there's a lot of pirated copies of an old un-closeable version of Microsoft Exchange Server running in China). Most of those are dynamic IP, so blocking is ineffective. HINET does not distinguish them in a special subdomain in reverse DNS, so I do block the whole thing.
This is not something I have seen in over a couple years. Do you have any recent incidents? I've not even gotten spam from them in the past few months (but if they are listed in ORDB or ORBZ then that could be why).
He's going to open his email to half of the world. That way he won't have to use telephone and fax with the part that uses email responsibly. The IP address and domain ranges that are open constitute his "private network", but without the mess of having to set up VPNs. Maybe he only cares about the part of the world community that doesn't harbor spammers on a massive scale.
And what if two people are using a mechanism like this, and one of them tries to send the first piece of mail to the other? How is the reply even going to get back?
The only difference between the way you would do it and the way I would do it, is you lose all the other mail, too, while I would not.
If you're going to block a range, the only range you need to block is the range the actual spam comes from. If you are capable of blocking a range, then you can succeed at blocking the spammer range. The only time you need to block the whole ISP is if they help the spammer evade your block. But as long as the ISP is simply providing basic IP service in a box, the content should be irrelevant to them (not to you or me, course).
The extreme danger in this is that it sets up the precedent that a hosting company has to judge content. Once they are judging one type of content, then they could be forced to judge another. They might end up having to take down a web site because the corporation it makes fun of, or reports about improprieties by, would be offended and threaten the ISP with a lawsuit. As long as the ISP doesn't give the spammer special treatment by letting them change IP addresses all the time, blocking gets the job done by blocking the spammer and not the ISP.
If you think that by doing this kind of blocking (of the whole ISP) often enough will cause spammers to somehow just disappear, you are delusional. Spammer types have always existed before the internet, and will continue to exist as the internet becomes entirely ubiquitous.
As long as there is perceived to be a target market for spam, there will be spammers, and they will find ways to deliver the garbage. And there is such a target market out there. While you and I pay greater costs, to the spammer it is a success because they very frequently get returns well in excess of expenditures (and the last time I looked, that was the way business worked).
Compare this to the illegal drug market in the US. As long as people want to buy these drugs, someone will find a way to deliver it, no matter how much the US law enforcement does to stop them. As the supply diminishes, the prices go up, and the attraction to enter supply side is greater. So it is with spam. The more we reduce it on everyone, the more successful the spammers who remain will be (because their target is less saturated). If instead of trying to stop all spam, we work on stopping spam from just us, and let it go on to those who don't really care (and whether you believe it or not, there are a large number of people out there who really don't care), then at least we can be spam free. Economics works with spam, too.
For newer software, wmic.exe helps. Plus seems like Windows.NET server is moving away from the registry model, starting with IIS6 using a XML based meabase for storing config info.
So, now we can use NOTEPAD to edit the configuration, if we can just figure out what the tags really mean, and whether what we need to provide is supposed to be an assignment inside the tag, or data enclosed between tags (I've even seen both ways used at the same time). DTD's anyone? Do people even read DTD's?
It was already refetching the content from the web site every cycle. I suspect a meta-refresh they had which had a syntax error (that probably obscured the intended page to move to) combined with the expires. Since the page was not in the cache, it got fetched again when it tried to refresh which fell back to using the same page. Here is what I see in the meta refresh:
... where the ? is actually byte code decimal 148, hexadecimal 94, octal 224. Note also the double quote all by itself after the path. Apparently they meant for a double quote where the funny character is, but some garbage got in there, so the value assigned to the content for refresh was just the funny character and 0. The path was lost altogther. So it refreshes the current page after 0 seconds, with no supporting cache.
Why web designers even do this jerking around to change URL is strange to me. Besides, in this case the apparent URL isn't even there (404). This is a borked web site.
But you seem to have missed the point of my words. Using solely the criteria of an open relay means that you run the risk of blocking legitimate communications to those that depend on your server, without their knowledge.
My users are fully aware of the spam blocking I employ. I've received no complaints, and only investigation requests. Most cases of "I was expecting this mail but never got it" came down to what you might call "collateral damage". In all of those cases it was a misconfigured server at the sender side. One was an actual open relay. Three were missing or invalid reverse DNS. All got fixed when the errant sysadmins were told what to do.
If my users prefer a mail service with less collateral loss, and more spam, they can either ask for it (I could set it up using a separate server), or they can move along to another provider. So far no one has asked for it.
My point is that ORDB is a very crude means of stopping spam- a real 'throw the baby out with the bath water' approach that is effective but also potentially damaging. There are better ways, and a number of posts in this thread have described them in detail.
I employ a combination of mechanisms. First is my own list of IP addresses to allow through, bypassing the remaining tests. Then the connecting IP address is queried over reverse DNS. If no name, the mail is rejected. The name received is queried by forward DNS requesting A-records. If the connecting address is not received in an A-record, the mail is rejected. If the DNS test passes, then the domain name is checked against a list of domain names to allow through. Then SBL, ORDB, and ORBZ are checked. Then my list of domains to reject is checked. And finally my list of IP addresses to reject is checked. Anything not yet rejected is allowed through.
Many suggested mechanisms require first accepting the mail, so that one can, for example, examine the headers or the mail body. I might some day add those mechanisms, but I do not want to remove the mechanisms that reject the bulk of spam prior to accepting the mail. This is the key. I don't want my server to become responsible for delivering the rejection message. For most spammers, the mail can't be delivered and either the mail stays in the queue retrying for a while, or my postmaster box gets the rejection of the rejection reply.
I have found that checking for keywords in content is not effective. Much mail gets matched that is not spam. Much spam is now sent as MIME encoded attachments, making it necessary to further run a detach and decode. Some spam even comes in MS Word format (tempting to get their product serial number out of it).
I'll stick with the mechanisms that work before mail is even delivered. It has a very high spam rejection count to collateral damage (67000 to 4 in the past 7 months).
That's the point. I don't have the freedom, as long as I might want to communicate with you or one of the people depending on your server, I must behave in a certain way.
You do not have the freedom to barge into my home at 3 AM just because you want to communicate with me. You have the freedom to try to communicate with me using civil means that do not violate my rights. You do not have any right to be guaranteed this communication. I might simply not answer the door at 3 AM. I might not even answer it at 3 PM. I'm not presuming you to be a criminal just because my server doesn't want your mail, or because I don't answer the knock at the door. And my users know this is happening and are free to use another service.
By using ordb, you are taking on a role which you should consider carefully. Your users have the right to receive their mail, regardless of it's origin, if they are paying you for that service.
I have considered the role very carefully over the past 2 years. What I do today is the result of it. Yes, my users do have a right to receive their mail. And they can choose to fully exercise that right any time they wish by any means, such as operating their own mail server, asking me to operate a different class of service for them, or asking another provider for service. Right now they are not paying me to accept mail from absolutely anywhere it happens to come.
I can only hope that you are open minded and are willing to consider the ramifications of controlling one's communication, without their knowledge. You have the right to do what you do, as does every link that makes up the ordb system, but by using the combined effect, you are inflicting potential damage. You can disregard this entire line of reasoning if your mail server is for you and you alone, but please reconsider, if others depend on it.
They are quite aware of what I am doing. They may not understand all the details (they have little interest, for example, in how SMTP or DNS actually works). They know their spam load is down. And they know they (the ones with their own domain names) can ask me for service via a fully open server (which is easy enough to do by binding a new IP address, changing their MX records, and starting a new instance of Postfix with a different configuration... I don't even need to invest in new hardware).
My big point is that even though I am providing a service to others, I am not obligated to provide that service in any way other than how I have agreed with my users to provide that service to them. Further, I can also decline to offer service of any type they might ask for, if that is my choice. While I might provide the fully open mail receipt service, if asked, I can tell you I will not provide a service of hosting a spam transmission operation (spamhaus) nor will I host an intentionally open relay. I will decline to offer any kinds of services which could in some way compromise those other services I do offer. And I do have the right to choose the business I will be in, including to choose not to provide any fully open mail reception, should I so choose.
WTF is wrong with www.imagestream.com? On Netscape 4.7, the page just blinks back and forth between all white and all gray. I switched off the proxy thinking that was the cause, and started a new browser process to be sure, and it's still doing the same thing. I looked at the HTML and I found:
<meta http-equiv="Expires" name="Expires" content="Wed Mar 18 23:59:00 EST 1998">
That's really smart. Expire the page before it even finishes loading. Maybe you should be glad you work for HP's contractor... unless you were their web programmer, in which case I see probable cause for letting you go.
They do have some control. They, or the company boss calls up and says "Get in-addr.arpa delegation working NOW or we have breach of contract!" and if they don't, you move on to another ISP because you're gonna lose if you stay with them. It is not my responsibility to let through 40% of the spam I'm now blocking because your business won't get a better ISP.
As for UU..., they will do it if you ask. I've set up about 20 businesses on UU... and never had any problems with in-addr.arpa delegation, even though the delegation went over to servers not even in the UU... address space. A couple times I had to repeat what I wanted, and got the call handed over to someone who actually knew what I was talking about.
Now there is one major ISP that seems to be very lame, brought to you by the letters Q and W).
I don't use SPEWS for a couple of reasons, and that is one of them. You have a Rackspace based mail server? Figure out my email address and send me something and see if it comes through.
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Obviously there are quite a number of clueless people at PayPal, starting with Peter Thiel. I haven't lost any money there, but I ran into their basic stupidity when I merely tried to close my PayPal account. A broken web page said to send email to a certain address to report problems. An auto-response from there said to use the web page to send a message. It was the broken one. Duh.
Supposedly that might be a stolen credit card. In any event, if the charges are reversed on you, you have to be able to bring legal action against whoever made the payment (assuming you give the money back to PayPal, which I'm assuming you won't be doing, so this is all academic talk). If PayPal tries to contact you again, see if they are willing to provide you with that legal information (they should be able to get it from the credit card company that reversed the charges on them). When people reverse credit card charges, they can get this information and pursue conventional legal civil action (complicated in your case by the trans-national aspects).
Also check your credit report in case they try to stick it on there as an unpaid debt. That kind of thing happens.
You can see PayPal's S-1 IPO filing here [1851943 bytes]. I haven't looked through it, yet, but from some other places I've heard it actually looks bad. Go see for yourself for the real truth.
This is probably because of extreme arrogance on the part of management. I read somewhere (trying to find it) where some manager was quoted that they had reduced the staff answering phones not to save money, but to discourage people from complaining. When I merely tried to close my PayPal account so I would no longer be spammed by them, I ran into many roadblocks, including a broken web server (I eventually figured out what was broken, but so far no one there seems to care), and auto-mail responses that direct you to a web page that fails and directs you back to the mail address that gives that auto-mail response. That's the kind of stupidity that goes on there.
I wonder if Arthur Andersen will be doing their audits (now that they went public, someone has to).
Quite possibly for a lot less money, and quite possibly trapped in that job under threat of having to leave the US and go back to their home country if they complain. And they certainly can't shop around for a better job even if there were any.
Managers are bad in general because they can get away with it. What? The programming staff thinks they're incompetent and leaves? Hire someone else. In these days when jobs are scarce (despite false industry claims that the shortage continues), managers don't have to satisfy their underlings; they have to satisfy their own boss, or it might be them out on the street. This is one of the reasons why so many companies totally suck, but it's all about brown-nosing, and never about doing good work.
That's standard lawyer scare tactics. There should be a law against it, but how to make such a law and not have it impede lawyers when you really need them to protect a legitimate violation, I'm not sure. Maybe assigning a cost to the threat itself, and if the threatener loses, they have to pay that as well. Of course lawyers would oppose such a law, so don't expect it to happen.
Which ones have integer multiply and divide (with remainder) instructions?
At least AOL will attempt to do something about spam originating there. They may not be able to prevent it the first time around, but once they cut that leecher off (using the 1000 free hours) they at least have a CC number they can store in a DB (hopefully as an MD5 checksum) to compare against to prevent another signup with the same number.
I don't know that it's 95%, but certainly a lot does. There are dregs in every population, and the USA is no exception. The problem is, because China hosts so many open relays, the USA spammers can bounce through there to evade the blacklisting that has been placed on them already. The end result is to block the USA spammers I still have to put in filters with Chinese IP addresses.
I almost, but never quite did, cut off all of Russia. The spam problem there has gone back down, at least for my regularly spammed email addresses. OTOH, I'm seeing a rise in spam from Indonesia, though not even near a need to cut off the country, yet.
I cut them off half a year ago. Hotmail is still open, because they at least try to do something about it.
IM2000 has its own risks. It allows "institutional spammers" (those who actually spam with their real identity) to not only save more money by dynamically generating your spam when you pick it up, but also track your mail reading habits as well. They know you picked up the mail, and they know where you were when you did (if you didn't use a proxy). IM2000 doesn't stop spam; it just gives you a better identity of who sent it, and tries to shift the cost back to them. But you can be sure they won't be storing a million copies of the very same spam, but instead will have one copy for all, and eventually add Java programming to make it all dynamic.
What if the IP address does not have a domain, or that domain is forged (e.g. forward DNS lookup fails to match). The contents (header, body) can all be forged, so that can't be used. The only thing one can be sure of is if they do reverse-the-forward DNS on the connecting server, then at least they know the domain of the server.
Actually, I don't accept mail from servers without proper reverse DNS that matches the IP address via forward. And that has cut out a massive amount of spam, globally and domestically. And with extremely little collateral damage (it's easy to fix the problem, and 4 out of 5 ISPs affected have fixed it).
If it were not for the fact that other "more surgical" techniques actually work to stifle spam injected at .com, I might join you in blocking the whole thing. The thing about the .com spam is you can:
The problem with the spam from China and Korea is that these methods are ineffective. Virtually all spam from C/K is from dialup, DSL, or broadband, or via open relays (there's a lot of pirated copies of an old un-closeable version of Microsoft Exchange Server running in China). Most of those are dynamic IP, so blocking is ineffective. HINET does not distinguish them in a special subdomain in reverse DNS, so I do block the whole thing.
This is not something I have seen in over a couple years. Do you have any recent incidents? I've not even gotten spam from them in the past few months (but if they are listed in ORDB or ORBZ then that could be why).
He's going to open his email to half of the world. That way he won't have to use telephone and fax with the part that uses email responsibly. The IP address and domain ranges that are open constitute his "private network", but without the mess of having to set up VPNs. Maybe he only cares about the part of the world community that doesn't harbor spammers on a massive scale.
And what if two people are using a mechanism like this, and one of them tries to send the first piece of mail to the other? How is the reply even going to get back?
The only difference between the way you would do it and the way I would do it, is you lose all the other mail, too, while I would not.
If you're going to block a range, the only range you need to block is the range the actual spam comes from. If you are capable of blocking a range, then you can succeed at blocking the spammer range. The only time you need to block the whole ISP is if they help the spammer evade your block. But as long as the ISP is simply providing basic IP service in a box, the content should be irrelevant to them (not to you or me, course).
The extreme danger in this is that it sets up the precedent that a hosting company has to judge content. Once they are judging one type of content, then they could be forced to judge another. They might end up having to take down a web site because the corporation it makes fun of, or reports about improprieties by, would be offended and threaten the ISP with a lawsuit. As long as the ISP doesn't give the spammer special treatment by letting them change IP addresses all the time, blocking gets the job done by blocking the spammer and not the ISP.
If you think that by doing this kind of blocking (of the whole ISP) often enough will cause spammers to somehow just disappear, you are delusional. Spammer types have always existed before the internet, and will continue to exist as the internet becomes entirely ubiquitous.
As long as there is perceived to be a target market for spam, there will be spammers, and they will find ways to deliver the garbage. And there is such a target market out there. While you and I pay greater costs, to the spammer it is a success because they very frequently get returns well in excess of expenditures (and the last time I looked, that was the way business worked).
Compare this to the illegal drug market in the US. As long as people want to buy these drugs, someone will find a way to deliver it, no matter how much the US law enforcement does to stop them. As the supply diminishes, the prices go up, and the attraction to enter supply side is greater. So it is with spam. The more we reduce it on everyone, the more successful the spammers who remain will be (because their target is less saturated). If instead of trying to stop all spam, we work on stopping spam from just us, and let it go on to those who don't really care (and whether you believe it or not, there are a large number of people out there who really don't care), then at least we can be spam free. Economics works with spam, too.
So, now we can use NOTEPAD to edit the configuration, if we can just figure out what the tags really mean, and whether what we need to provide is supposed to be an assignment inside the tag, or data enclosed between tags (I've even seen both ways used at the same time). DTD's anyone? Do people even read DTD's?
It was already refetching the content from the web site every cycle. I suspect a meta-refresh they had which had a syntax error (that probably obscured the intended page to move to) combined with the expires. Since the page was not in the cache, it got fetched again when it tried to refresh which fell back to using the same page. Here is what I see in the meta refresh:
... where the ? is actually byte code decimal 148, hexadecimal 94, octal 224. Note also the double quote all by itself after the path. Apparently they meant for a double quote where the funny character is, but some garbage got in there, so the value assigned to the content for refresh was just the funny character and 0. The path was lost altogther. So it refreshes the current page after 0 seconds, with no supporting cache.
Why web designers even do this jerking around to change URL is strange to me. Besides, in this case the apparent URL isn't even there (404). This is a borked web site.
My users are fully aware of the spam blocking I employ. I've received no complaints, and only investigation requests. Most cases of "I was expecting this mail but never got it" came down to what you might call "collateral damage". In all of those cases it was a misconfigured server at the sender side. One was an actual open relay. Three were missing or invalid reverse DNS. All got fixed when the errant sysadmins were told what to do.
If my users prefer a mail service with less collateral loss, and more spam, they can either ask for it (I could set it up using a separate server), or they can move along to another provider. So far no one has asked for it.
I employ a combination of mechanisms. First is my own list of IP addresses to allow through, bypassing the remaining tests. Then the connecting IP address is queried over reverse DNS. If no name, the mail is rejected. The name received is queried by forward DNS requesting A-records. If the connecting address is not received in an A-record, the mail is rejected. If the DNS test passes, then the domain name is checked against a list of domain names to allow through. Then SBL, ORDB, and ORBZ are checked. Then my list of domains to reject is checked. And finally my list of IP addresses to reject is checked. Anything not yet rejected is allowed through.
Many suggested mechanisms require first accepting the mail, so that one can, for example, examine the headers or the mail body. I might some day add those mechanisms, but I do not want to remove the mechanisms that reject the bulk of spam prior to accepting the mail. This is the key. I don't want my server to become responsible for delivering the rejection message. For most spammers, the mail can't be delivered and either the mail stays in the queue retrying for a while, or my postmaster box gets the rejection of the rejection reply.
I have found that checking for keywords in content is not effective. Much mail gets matched that is not spam. Much spam is now sent as MIME encoded attachments, making it necessary to further run a detach and decode. Some spam even comes in MS Word format (tempting to get their product serial number out of it).
I'll stick with the mechanisms that work before mail is even delivered. It has a very high spam rejection count to collateral damage (67000 to 4 in the past 7 months).
You do not have the freedom to barge into my home at 3 AM just because you want to communicate with me. You have the freedom to try to communicate with me using civil means that do not violate my rights. You do not have any right to be guaranteed this communication. I might simply not answer the door at 3 AM. I might not even answer it at 3 PM. I'm not presuming you to be a criminal just because my server doesn't want your mail, or because I don't answer the knock at the door. And my users know this is happening and are free to use another service.
I have considered the role very carefully over the past 2 years. What I do today is the result of it. Yes, my users do have a right to receive their mail. And they can choose to fully exercise that right any time they wish by any means, such as operating their own mail server, asking me to operate a different class of service for them, or asking another provider for service. Right now they are not paying me to accept mail from absolutely anywhere it happens to come.
They are quite aware of what I am doing. They may not understand all the details (they have little interest, for example, in how SMTP or DNS actually works). They know their spam load is down. And they know they (the ones with their own domain names) can ask me for service via a fully open server (which is easy enough to do by binding a new IP address, changing their MX records, and starting a new instance of Postfix with a different configuration ... I don't even need to invest in new hardware).
My big point is that even though I am providing a service to others, I am not obligated to provide that service in any way other than how I have agreed with my users to provide that service to them. Further, I can also decline to offer service of any type they might ask for, if that is my choice. While I might provide the fully open mail receipt service, if asked, I can tell you I will not provide a service of hosting a spam transmission operation (spamhaus) nor will I host an intentionally open relay. I will decline to offer any kinds of services which could in some way compromise those other services I do offer. And I do have the right to choose the business I will be in, including to choose not to provide any fully open mail reception, should I so choose.
Why not DVDs? Why not all the software? Why did the engineers think the drive could not fail?
WTF is wrong with www.imagestream.com? On Netscape 4.7, the page just blinks back and forth between all white and all gray. I switched off the proxy thinking that was the cause, and started a new browser process to be sure, and it's still doing the same thing. I looked at the HTML and I found:
That's really smart. Expire the page before it even finishes loading. Maybe you should be glad you work for HP's contractor ... unless you were their web programmer, in which case I see probable cause for letting you go.
They do have some control. They, or the company boss calls up and says "Get in-addr.arpa delegation working NOW or we have breach of contract!" and if they don't, you move on to another ISP because you're gonna lose if you stay with them. It is not my responsibility to let through 40% of the spam I'm now blocking because your business won't get a better ISP.
As for UU..., they will do it if you ask. I've set up about 20 businesses on UU... and never had any problems with in-addr.arpa delegation, even though the delegation went over to servers not even in the UU... address space. A couple times I had to repeat what I wanted, and got the call handed over to someone who actually knew what I was talking about.
Now there is one major ISP that seems to be very lame, brought to you by the letters Q and W).
I don't use SPEWS for a couple of reasons, and that is one of them. You have a Rackspace based mail server? Figure out my email address and send me something and see if it comes through.