Long-Lime Anti-Blocklist Crusader Still At It (Score 1)

Good grief. Is Bennet Haselton still at it? I first crossed swords with him over a decade ago when I was Executive Director of Mail Abuse Prevention Systems, the famous or infamous, you pick, maintainers of the Realtime Blackhole List. Haselton should stick to what he knows best, and that is blocking of *websites*. I see his knowledge of blocking technology by email service providers is as dismal as ever. Hotmail and Yahoo have every right to block email they perceive to be spam. If they did not do so, their servers would crash under the barrage of email arriving every second. They spend countless expensive CPU cycles just *blocking* the spam from their networks. Is the system perfect? No. That is why both organizations have staff to deal with the "false positives" -- another needless expense for which you can thank the spammers. I know the anti-spam staff at both Hotmail and Yahoo. Members of their staff spend their entire days reviewing and responding to complaints about false positives, as well as tweaking the anti-spam filters. Forgive me if I don't shed any tears if the staff doesn't respond to Mr. Haselton's demands just because he stamps his feet. They're dancing as fast as they can. And you know what? Both Yahoo and Hotmail are *free* services! Imagine that! Do you know what else? There are many, many mailing list owners who will not accept subscribers with Hotmail or Yahoo email addresses *because* of deliverability problems at these two services. Both services are very well known by savvy mailing list managers for delivery problems. An entire industry of deliverability consultants has emerged to deal with email delivery problems at Hotmail and Yahoo. No, resolving email delivery problems at Hotmail and Yahoo is not for the faint of heart. I also see that Mr. Haselton has not lost his fondness of conspiracy theories. I seriously doubt that Yahoo and Hotmail are sharing their blocklists. They are competitors, after all. And suppose they did share information about their blocklists. What of it? It is entirely within their prerogative to do so. I would even say it represents efficiency for the two organizations to share their blocklists. But I'm reasonably confident that they don't. I believe Mr. Haselton has a fundamental problem with blocklists, period. I believe he has taken his philosophy at Peacefire about blocking web sites and is naively attempting to apply it to email. I base this belief on email exchanges and conversations I have had with Mr. Haselton. He does good work with Peacefire. I think he should stick to doing what he knows best and stop his crusade against blocklists. Until spam is eliminated -- which will never happen -- they are here to stay. And that is a Good Thing because email would be unusable otherwise. Nick Nicholas