In all other versions of windows the service cannot be disabled.
I keep reading that. But I run Win98, which isn't in your list. These don't effect me. I use Opera for a browser, but that shouldn't tie in, as best I know. I think I turned this "feature" off some time back, but it's long enough ago I don't really remember.
What I do know for sure is that my Win98 system doesn't get them now, and hasn't for a long time. So saying it "can not be disabled" seems wrong to me. I don't think it's enabled here.
That was the Supreme Court in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Comm'n, 447 U.S. 557 (1980).
Apparently, that's the only court case you have ever heard of - else you wouldn't bring it up time after time, showing each time that you simply don't understand the context.
I'm beginning to wonder if you know anything about First Amendment law whatsoever.
And I see you're still trying to pretend to have a clue. That part doesn't shock me at all. Are you claiming to be a lawyer now?:^)
His condescending attitude towards the talented programmers who have created so much of the infrastructure the Internet depends on (Linux, BSD, Apache, MySQL anyone?) is a bit infuriating, to say the least.
You'll enjoy this, I think...
11/06/03 07:55:19 Browsing http://www.princeton.edu/
Fetching http://www.princeton.edu/...
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.princeton.edu
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 13:55:26 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.1.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
Cache-Control: max-age=2
Expires: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 13:55:28 GMT
Connection: close
It's a beautiful dream. However, it relies in many places on trust. You say "it's spoof proof because it rely's on the message ID from the SMTP server" which ignores the fact that anyone can run an SMPT server - and they can do so honestly, or dishonestly. Spammers are already putting SMPT engines into viruses so they can have them send their mail.
Your system would have to be depolyed by everyone on the net, and the spammers would find a way around it. For instance, you say "All other routers see the stamp and wave it through". So step one, they forge a stamp. You're router gets the mail, see's a stamp, passes it through.
It's just a matter of time before someone ends up with a huge bill for emails that he never sent, because a spammer found a way to hack his account or forge his ID. And, as I've pointed out before, if you can make that sort of thing impossible, you can pretty much end it without charging people to send email.
If you throw away SMTP and start over (which may be neeeded to fix the problem) then you can save a lot of trouble by delivering only a "We have a message waiting for you" message to the receiver. When he gets that, he can go get the message, or not. It gets very hard for spammers to hide if they have to sit out in the open until you decide to get their mail. They like to send and run. If they have to sit and wait, then they can't hide. Their IP can be reported, and a distributed list of abusive IP's can be used to dump all connections to/from those machines. Bandwidth isn't wasted sending stuff people don't want - very little bandwidth is used until they say "Yes I want that". Whitelists can be used so that when you receive the "message waiting" alert for mail from a friend/coworker/mailing list (anyplace you receive mail from regularly) your server can know to grab it right away. And you don't have to risk someone getting a huge bill for spam they didn't send.
Great. All you have to do is trust them with your password information, pay them (first month free!), wait for them to download and process your mail each time you log in (according to their FAQ, you log in to their server, then they go get the mail that you are already waiting for, process it, and then start feeding it to you), use a website to review in case they marked legitimate mail as spam, use a website to return any spam they passed on, etc. Yeah, sounds great.
Um, I've told you that I have contacted my ISP, but please don't let this interrupt your shrink-wrapped ranting.
Yes. But you did that only after having said that you wouldn't. You started off with the idea that *your* ISP couldn't posssibly support spam, so looking at evidence, or asking why they were blacklisted was unimportant. You're still in denial about it now.
I have looked at your links, and what I see is data, not evidence. Let's look at this from a statistical point of view. Take an ISP with 10,000 machines, with an established pricing strategy and an established policy on dealing with spam (good or bad, it doesn't make any difference). Now take 10 of those machines and put them under a different company, which has an identical pricing strategy and identical spam policy. Run for a year, look for what you call evidence, and, hey presto, the company with 9,990 machines will have generated hundreds of times more complaints than the one with 10 machines, so any idiot can see that they have different policies. That, in essence, is what your 'evidence' boils down to. Oh, and the fact that they are in Spews so they ought to be in Spews, which looks a trifle circular to me. If you don't have a baseline that takes into account the number of machines and their suitability for spamming in bandwidth terms, counting the number of abuse posts is utterly meaningless. Do get back to me if you see a flaw in this reasoning.
It's true that a larger ISP will show more reports than a smaller one, assuming all other things are equal. However, you've shown no evidence, no data, no anything to indicate that other things are equal.
Spews isn't perfect. We're agreed on that. However, you seem to believe that they add any IP they can, whenever they can, regardless of any evidence that they are supporting spam. I believe that they add IP's only when the owner of that IP has shown that they don't get rid of abusers. They have nothing to gain by adding random IP's. I know that bouncing mail based on Spews list will result in a huge decrease in spam. It will also likely cause some legitimate mail to bounce.
Occam's razor leads me to believe that if I can see thousands of abuse reports, and Spews bothered to add them, there has probably been a fair amount of abuse and a history of slow or nonexistent abuse handling.
I don't use Spews. (For that matter, I don't bounce any mail based on a DNSBL - at least for now.) I don't always agree with Spews. However, they are one DNSBL out of several. No system is required to use them. The admins that decide to use their blocklist are making their own choices, for their own systems. I have no problem with that. Some admins use another DNSBL, some let everything through, and some spend the time to create their own internal blacklists.
You are upset (almost to the point of supporting DDoS attacks) because your IP was listed. Do you feel that lists of abusive IP's should be banned/illegal? Do you feel that admins should have no choice to bounce mail based on DNSBL lists? To me, that's the issue. If someone else started putting out the IPIH list (IP's I Hate) which used completely arbitrary reasons for listing, would you consider that wrong? Illegal? Spamcop's DNSBL has a number of flaws which can blacklist IP's for no good reason, primarily because it's mostly automated. Do you consider that abusive?
And do you realize that the alternative to bouncing mail from suspected sources of spam (or other spam supporting IP's) is to accept all the spam, eat the bandwidth, and filter it all later?
Until a better solution is available (none in sight at this point) bouncing the mail is a solution that isn't likely to go away, regardless of how you feel. I believe that over time, we're likely to see many more DNSBL's for the admins to choose from. Those that do a good job are probably going to be more popular than others - but that isn't likely to keep the others from exist
(Sigh.) There are thousands of complaints that I can see. SPEWS apparently felt that they were not resoloving complaints, else they wouldn't have escalated. That's pretty convincing evidence from where I sit. The only reason I would have to believe that they dont have a spam problem is one guy on/. who admits he hates SPEWS and hasn't checked. A guy who has posted himself that he won't look at the evidence. A guy who said early on "the one thing I'm never going to do is contact my ISP". A guy who looks like nothing but a troll.
If you won't even click on the link, then you won't even see that there are thousands of spams reported to NANAS. Only a small fraction of spam is reported, and only a fraction of that is posted to NANAS, so there is a *lot* of spam.
I'm sure your spamhouse will say "No, we don't allow spam, see, our AUP is available over here and it says NO SPAM in big letters." That is meaningless if they refuse to shut off the spammers.
Personally, I think I'm arguing with a troll, and that's a waste of time, so I won't be replying.
I'm pretty sure that until the Linux idiots figure out that people don't want to refer to a reference manual or website so they can do something as simple as edit a text file, Linux is going to remain a "geek only" thing.
Nothing you said makes sense. I have no idea what you mean by a "live" email. I've got email from a year ago sitting in Eudora. It isn't dead.
Email messasges can (and in the case of spam, quite often are) spoofed. Charging the owner of that address for spam isn't going to help. It doesn't matter if the owner of that address has "paid up front" as you say, because THEY DID NOT SEND THE MAIL. Once you grasp this basic concept, maybe we can talk.
I'm not saying they are "encouraging" the use of their systems for spamming. However, it is very unlikely that SPEWS would have escalated if they would have put a stop to the spamming that was going on.
You may not like it, just as I don't like spam, but it's a fact of life. Some systems are going to block mail from some IP addresses. You hate SPEWS - and that is your right. I'm not a huge fan of them myself. But that doesn't make a DDoS acceptable. And you don't seem to realize that if it were not for distributed lists like SPEWS, those IP's would get listed in thousands of individual local lists, and you would never *ever* get out of them. At least if you clean up your shit, SPEWS will eventually remove you.
No ISP can guarantee that none of their users will ever send spam. However, any ISP that wants to be seen as a white hat can damn sure shut off the spammer after they are reported. And if they don't, they are black hat, and aiding spammers. And systems like yours will continue to get blacklisted.
Regardless, you're supporting a spamhouse, and you've made it pretty clear you believe that anyone who fights against your pet spamhouse is on your "DDoS Em I Don't Care" list.
Visit this link for evidence that your buddies at Host Euorope have a spam problem. I know, I know - you don't really care.
t used to be that only Radio Shack asked who you were... get used to EVERYONE doing it... because they'll be able to partner with other retailers and cross-sell products using that loophole in the Do-Not-Call law.
Radio Shack has quit doing that, according to what I've read. I rarely do business with them, so I don't have any recent personal experience.
I mostly support you on this, but not quite completely. I am the owner of two small businesses, and a small business finds it very hard to get the word out about its existence.
So buy an ad in the newspaper, or on radio. You seem to believe in the "My shit don't stink" theory that the DMA uses. They always claim that spam is junk email that other people send - not *their* junk email.
I'm sick and tired of "businesmen" claiming that because their fucking business is so damn important, I should have to waste my time, be woken up, pay for their spam, etc. You want to advertise? Fine - pay for it using traditional media. You want to harass me? Fuck you.
That's a good question. It may save google a little bandwidth, and it would essentially put a stop to the virus. (They would modify and re-release it, of course, but it would still help.)
In order for it to work, you need a system which lets you verify exactly who is sending the email. If you don't know exactly who is sending the email, then who do you bill?
If we could verify who is sending the email, blocking spammers would be easy. But there is no way to tell, and spammers regularly forge other peoples addresses. Any pay-per-email system only works after authenticated email has been developed - and once authenticated email works, pay-per-email isn't needed in the first place.
There are other problems, but that's the biggie. If you can't solve it, the others are unimportant.
Mandrake is user oriented? I can't tell it from my experience.
I'm not a Linux geek, but I am a geek. So a couple of years ago, I decided I'd set up a linux system, primarily to learn Linux on. I read some newsgroups, asked some questions, and ended up getting Mandrake. I bought a used computer to set it up on, and blew away Windows while reformating. I didn't have much trouble with the install. (There was one problem, but I logged on with a Win98 machine, posted to a usenet group, and soon had a reply to my question.)
But what could I do with it? Nothing. Zilch. To even try to do anything, I kept being told "Change this config file" and crap. And to change those config files, I was supposed to use some "text" editor that must have been developed in an attempt to compete with the old DOS Edlin program. Yeah, that's user friendly.
So, I had a machine sitting there, and it ran Linux. Wow. But I couldn't go online with it. I couldn't do email with it. I couldn't edit a freakin text file without going through major pain. I couldn't write a letter - much less print one.
And this is what you call "user friendly"? Sorry, but that's exactly why MS continues to be the more popular system. Most people don't want a computer so that they can learn how to use archaic crap like Edlin, they want a computer to help them do the things they want to do. And Linux doesn't do that.
It's been a few years. Maybe things have changed. But I keep reading, and I haven't been convinced that it's worth trying again. The Linux world is still based around "If you aren't a programmer, if you just want your computer to be useful, then we don't want you and you aren't c001 like us" mentality.
The machine I bought to run Linux is now running win98, and it's useful. (Old and slow, but useful for it's purpose.) I've got a couple of used machines sitting aroung unused. Convince me that I can at least do the basics under Linux without feeling like I'm in a torture chamber, and I'll try it again.
But from where I sit, any talk of Linux and "user friendly" are mutually exclusive.
First, the article isn't about SPEWS, it's about Spamhaus.
Second, it's sad you believe that DDoS is acceptable for Spews, Spamhaus, or anyone else.
Third, you claim that your ISP has a "strict anti-spam policy" but obviously they don't actually enforce that, or SPEWS wouldn't have escalated.
Fourth, when you say that you would never contact your ISP, you make it clear that you know they don't care if their users send spam or if they are blacklisted. Using C&W, are you?
Popfile requires you to download the mail. In a two day span, while my power supply was dead, my mailbox collected over 1000 emails. 900-950 of those were spam.
Sorry, I just don't want to wait for hours while I download the messages over a dial-up so that Popfile can sort the spam into a "bucket". And I don't want to have to dig through that bucket every day, when I finally get the mail downloaded, so that I can tell it "Yeah, you got those right, but this message was spam, and those over there were false positives".
I'm using Mailwasher (www.mailwasher.net) which is free, and which helps sort the junk from the legitimate mail before I download the whole thing. It DL's headers, hides mail which fits into certain criteria (based on keywords, whitelists) and almost everything else will be spam. It can, if you choose, check with blacklists (spews, spamcop, etc) to see if the sending IP was on a blacklist. And it saves a lot of time.
Bayesian filtering may do a good job of sorting the crap once you've downloaded it, but you have to DL it first.
For personal filtering, nothing beats a good bayesian filter.
My power supply died Saturday. I bought a new one Sunday, and installed it Monday. That left me unable to check email for two days. In that time, I received over 900 spam messages, plus another 100 legitimate email messages. I have a dial-up account. Which leads to my point.
In order to use bayesian filtering, I would have to download *all* of the mail. Sure, after I'd downloaded the crap, the bayesian filter could do a hell of a job, no doubt. But I'd still have to wait for hours while the mail downloaded. And I'd have to put up with that every damn time I checked my email. Screw that.
Bayesian filtering is a good idea, and it may be fine for people who don't have very public email addresses and get only a small amount of spam. It may be fine if you've got a fast connection, and it would almost certainly be acceptable if you had a 24 hour connection where you could run an auto mail check every 15 minutes. But for a dial up user like me, it sucks.
You are not required to use them. I don't reject mail based on SPEWS or any other blacklist, either, for similar reasons. I don't trust them.
But you seem to imply that other people should be forced to quit using blacklists because you don't like them. Screw that. Those are not your systems, they belong to those people. The admins of those systems get to decide.
You're talk about stupid antispam "fixes" and I'm all for antispammers and spammers beating each other up. They both suck. and others you put in other messages make it sound like you blame the spam problem on people fighting against spam. That's sort of like blaming cops because people lock their doors and put up security cameras.
And you're "solution" is whitelists. That's fine if you never need to receive mail from anyone you don't already know. Perhaps it works for you. I certainly use whitelisting as part of my filtering. But relying on nothing but whitelists leaves a lot of legitimate email undeliverable.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep reading that. But I run Win98, which isn't in your list. These don't effect me. I use Opera for a browser, but that shouldn't tie in, as best I know. I think I turned this "feature" off some time back, but it's long enough ago I don't really remember.
What I do know for sure is that my Win98 system doesn't get them now, and hasn't for a long time. So saying it "can not be disabled" seems wrong to me. I don't think it's enabled here.
Apparently, that's the only court case you have ever heard of - else you wouldn't bring it up time after time, showing each time that you simply don't understand the context.
I'm beginning to wonder if you know anything about First Amendment law whatsoever.
And I see you're still trying to pretend to have a clue. That part doesn't shock me at all. Are you claiming to be a lawyer now? :^)
192.168.0.1
192.168.0.2
192.168.0.3
192.168.0.4
Think! man Think! Do you have any idea how many domains you just ran throught the /. effect?
Not to mention hypocritical, considering that princeton.edu is running Apache... :^)
You'll enjoy this, I think...
11/06/03 07:55:19 Browsing http://www.princeton.edu/ ...
Fetching http://www.princeton.edu/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.princeton.edu
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 13:55:26 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.1.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
Cache-Control: max-age=2
Expires: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 13:55:28 GMT
Connection: close
Your system would have to be depolyed by everyone on the net, and the spammers would find a way around it. For instance, you say "All other routers see the stamp and wave it through". So step one, they forge a stamp. You're router gets the mail, see's a stamp, passes it through.
It's just a matter of time before someone ends up with a huge bill for emails that he never sent, because a spammer found a way to hack his account or forge his ID. And, as I've pointed out before, if you can make that sort of thing impossible, you can pretty much end it without charging people to send email.
If you throw away SMTP and start over (which may be neeeded to fix the problem) then you can save a lot of trouble by delivering only a "We have a message waiting for you" message to the receiver. When he gets that, he can go get the message, or not. It gets very hard for spammers to hide if they have to sit out in the open until you decide to get their mail. They like to send and run. If they have to sit and wait, then they can't hide. Their IP can be reported, and a distributed list of abusive IP's can be used to dump all connections to/from those machines. Bandwidth isn't wasted sending stuff people don't want - very little bandwidth is used until they say "Yes I want that". Whitelists can be used so that when you receive the "message waiting" alert for mail from a friend/coworker/mailing list (anyplace you receive mail from regularly) your server can know to grab it right away. And you don't have to risk someone getting a huge bill for spam they didn't send.
Um, I've told you that I have contacted my ISP, but please don't let this interrupt your shrink-wrapped ranting.
Yes. But you did that only after having said that you wouldn't. You started off with the idea that *your* ISP couldn't posssibly support spam, so looking at evidence, or asking why they were blacklisted was unimportant. You're still in denial about it now.
I have looked at your links, and what I see is data, not evidence. Let's look at this from a statistical point of view. Take an ISP with 10,000 machines, with an established pricing strategy and an established policy on dealing with spam (good or bad, it doesn't make any difference). Now take 10 of those machines and put them under a different company, which has an identical pricing strategy and identical spam policy. Run for a year, look for what you call evidence, and, hey presto, the company with 9,990 machines will have generated hundreds of times more complaints than the one with 10 machines, so any idiot can see that they have different policies. That, in essence, is what your 'evidence' boils down to. Oh, and the fact that they are in Spews so they ought to be in Spews, which looks a trifle circular to me. If you don't have a baseline that takes into account the number of machines and their suitability for spamming in bandwidth terms, counting the number of abuse posts is utterly meaningless. Do get back to me if you see a flaw in this reasoning.
It's true that a larger ISP will show more reports than a smaller one, assuming all other things are equal. However, you've shown no evidence, no data, no anything to indicate that other things are equal.
Spews isn't perfect. We're agreed on that. However, you seem to believe that they add any IP they can, whenever they can, regardless of any evidence that they are supporting spam. I believe that they add IP's only when the owner of that IP has shown that they don't get rid of abusers. They have nothing to gain by adding random IP's. I know that bouncing mail based on Spews list will result in a huge decrease in spam. It will also likely cause some legitimate mail to bounce.
Occam's razor leads me to believe that if I can see thousands of abuse reports, and Spews bothered to add them, there has probably been a fair amount of abuse and a history of slow or nonexistent abuse handling.
I don't use Spews. (For that matter, I don't bounce any mail based on a DNSBL - at least for now.) I don't always agree with Spews. However, they are one DNSBL out of several. No system is required to use them. The admins that decide to use their blocklist are making their own choices, for their own systems. I have no problem with that. Some admins use another DNSBL, some let everything through, and some spend the time to create their own internal blacklists.
You are upset (almost to the point of supporting DDoS attacks) because your IP was listed. Do you feel that lists of abusive IP's should be banned/illegal? Do you feel that admins should have no choice to bounce mail based on DNSBL lists? To me, that's the issue. If someone else started putting out the IPIH list (IP's I Hate) which used completely arbitrary reasons for listing, would you consider that wrong? Illegal? Spamcop's DNSBL has a number of flaws which can blacklist IP's for no good reason, primarily because it's mostly automated. Do you consider that abusive?
And do you realize that the alternative to bouncing mail from suspected sources of spam (or other spam supporting IP's) is to accept all the spam, eat the bandwidth, and filter it all later?
Until a better solution is available (none in sight at this point) bouncing the mail is a solution that isn't likely to go away, regardless of how you feel. I believe that over time, we're likely to see many more DNSBL's for the admins to choose from. Those that do a good job are probably going to be more popular than others - but that isn't likely to keep the others from exist
I'm sure your spamhouse will say "No, we don't allow spam, see, our AUP is available over here and it says NO SPAM in big letters." That is meaningless if they refuse to shut off the spammers.
Personally, I think I'm arguing with a troll, and that's a waste of time, so I won't be replying.
I'll pass. I've never found arguing with trolls to be interesting or productive.
I'm pretty sure that until the Linux idiots figure out that people don't want to refer to a reference manual or website so they can do something as simple as edit a text file, Linux is going to remain a "geek only" thing.
Email messasges can (and in the case of spam, quite often are) spoofed. Charging the owner of that address for spam isn't going to help. It doesn't matter if the owner of that address has "paid up front" as you say, because THEY DID NOT SEND THE MAIL. Once you grasp this basic concept, maybe we can talk.
You may not like it, just as I don't like spam, but it's a fact of life. Some systems are going to block mail from some IP addresses. You hate SPEWS - and that is your right. I'm not a huge fan of them myself. But that doesn't make a DDoS acceptable. And you don't seem to realize that if it were not for distributed lists like SPEWS, those IP's would get listed in thousands of individual local lists, and you would never *ever* get out of them. At least if you clean up your shit, SPEWS will eventually remove you.
No ISP can guarantee that none of their users will ever send spam. However, any ISP that wants to be seen as a white hat can damn sure shut off the spammer after they are reported. And if they don't, they are black hat, and aiding spammers. And systems like yours will continue to get blacklisted.
Regardless, you're supporting a spamhouse, and you've made it pretty clear you believe that anyone who fights against your pet spamhouse is on your "DDoS Em I Don't Care" list.
Visit this link for evidence that your buddies at Host Euorope have a spam problem. I know, I know - you don't really care.
Radio Shack has quit doing that, according to what I've read. I rarely do business with them, so I don't have any recent personal experience.
So buy an ad in the newspaper, or on radio. You seem to believe in the "My shit don't stink" theory that the DMA uses. They always claim that spam is junk email that other people send - not *their* junk email.
I'm sick and tired of "businesmen" claiming that because their fucking business is so damn important, I should have to waste my time, be woken up, pay for their spam, etc. You want to advertise? Fine - pay for it using traditional media. You want to harass me? Fuck you.
Yeah, several of them.
In order for it to work, you need a system which lets you verify exactly who is sending the email. If you don't know exactly who is sending the email, then who do you bill?
If we could verify who is sending the email, blocking spammers would be easy. But there is no way to tell, and spammers regularly forge other peoples addresses. Any pay-per-email system only works after authenticated email has been developed - and once authenticated email works, pay-per-email isn't needed in the first place.
There are other problems, but that's the biggie. If you can't solve it, the others are unimportant.
I'm not a Linux geek, but I am a geek. So a couple of years ago, I decided I'd set up a linux system, primarily to learn Linux on. I read some newsgroups, asked some questions, and ended up getting Mandrake. I bought a used computer to set it up on, and blew away Windows while reformating. I didn't have much trouble with the install. (There was one problem, but I logged on with a Win98 machine, posted to a usenet group, and soon had a reply to my question.)
But what could I do with it? Nothing. Zilch. To even try to do anything, I kept being told "Change this config file" and crap. And to change those config files, I was supposed to use some "text" editor that must have been developed in an attempt to compete with the old DOS Edlin program. Yeah, that's user friendly.
So, I had a machine sitting there, and it ran Linux. Wow. But I couldn't go online with it. I couldn't do email with it. I couldn't edit a freakin text file without going through major pain. I couldn't write a letter - much less print one.
And this is what you call "user friendly"? Sorry, but that's exactly why MS continues to be the more popular system. Most people don't want a computer so that they can learn how to use archaic crap like Edlin, they want a computer to help them do the things they want to do. And Linux doesn't do that.
It's been a few years. Maybe things have changed. But I keep reading, and I haven't been convinced that it's worth trying again. The Linux world is still based around "If you aren't a programmer, if you just want your computer to be useful, then we don't want you and you aren't c001 like us" mentality.
The machine I bought to run Linux is now running win98, and it's useful. (Old and slow, but useful for it's purpose.) I've got a couple of used machines sitting aroung unused. Convince me that I can at least do the basics under Linux without feeling like I'm in a torture chamber, and I'll try it again.
But from where I sit, any talk of Linux and "user friendly" are mutually exclusive.
Second, it's sad you believe that DDoS is acceptable for Spews, Spamhaus, or anyone else.
Third, you claim that your ISP has a "strict anti-spam policy" but obviously they don't actually enforce that, or SPEWS wouldn't have escalated.
Fourth, when you say that you would never contact your ISP, you make it clear that you know they don't care if their users send spam or if they are blacklisted. Using C&W, are you?
Sorry, I just don't want to wait for hours while I download the messages over a dial-up so that Popfile can sort the spam into a "bucket". And I don't want to have to dig through that bucket every day, when I finally get the mail downloaded, so that I can tell it "Yeah, you got those right, but this message was spam, and those over there were false positives".
I'm using Mailwasher (www.mailwasher.net) which is free, and which helps sort the junk from the legitimate mail before I download the whole thing. It DL's headers, hides mail which fits into certain criteria (based on keywords, whitelists) and almost everything else will be spam. It can, if you choose, check with blacklists (spews, spamcop, etc) to see if the sending IP was on a blacklist. And it saves a lot of time.
Bayesian filtering may do a good job of sorting the crap once you've downloaded it, but you have to DL it first.
My power supply died Saturday. I bought a new one Sunday, and installed it Monday. That left me unable to check email for two days. In that time, I received over 900 spam messages, plus another 100 legitimate email messages. I have a dial-up account. Which leads to my point.
In order to use bayesian filtering, I would have to download *all* of the mail. Sure, after I'd downloaded the crap, the bayesian filter could do a hell of a job, no doubt. But I'd still have to wait for hours while the mail downloaded. And I'd have to put up with that every damn time I checked my email. Screw that.
Bayesian filtering is a good idea, and it may be fine for people who don't have very public email addresses and get only a small amount of spam. It may be fine if you've got a fast connection, and it would almost certainly be acceptable if you had a 24 hour connection where you could run an auto mail check every 15 minutes. But for a dial up user like me, it sucks.
You are not required to use them. I don't reject mail based on SPEWS or any other blacklist, either, for similar reasons. I don't trust them.
But you seem to imply that other people should be forced to quit using blacklists because you don't like them. Screw that. Those are not your systems, they belong to those people. The admins of those systems get to decide.
You're talk about stupid antispam "fixes" and I'm all for antispammers and spammers beating each other up. They both suck. and others you put in other messages make it sound like you blame the spam problem on people fighting against spam. That's sort of like blaming cops because people lock their doors and put up security cameras.
And you're "solution" is whitelists. That's fine if you never need to receive mail from anyone you don't already know. Perhaps it works for you. I certainly use whitelisting as part of my filtering. But relying on nothing but whitelists leaves a lot of legitimate email undeliverable.