At 06:50 PM 1/12/2004, Vernon Schryver wrote... >Instead of paying the extra cost to hire an ISP that cares >enough to not have spamming customers, people complain about the evils >of blacklists. Feh. Once again with an argument based on incorrect assumptions. I don't spam. I would preferentially route email direct for two main reasons: 1) privacy - routing via my ISP's outbound SMTP gives them the right to intercept and read my email, according the ECPA; 2) control - sending from my own system allows me to control retry attempts and times, instead of being forced to wait 4 days for my ISP to bounce an undelivered back to me, assuming they don't just silently lose it. I can't do so because my IP address is on a blacklist. I have cable modem, but the world thinks I'm a dial-up. For that reason alone, having nothing whatsoever to do with spam, I'm forced to give up privacy and control of my communications. "Anti-spam" initiatives that are based on such blacklists are quite simply the failed results of irrational, fascist thought. Regardless of your exact definition of spam, all reasonable ones I've heard have one thing in common - it's based on CONTENT, not IP address. Blacklists couldn't care less about content - legitimate email or spam, out it goes, to the detriment of communications, which is the Internet's raison d'etre. I take that back, it used to be that way. Now the Internet is meant to make big corporations lots of money. Blacklists also, quite clearly, don't work to eliminate spam.