You can't have the spam you don't pay for February 27th, 2007

Love him or hate him, John Levine sure knows how to illustrate a point.

Recently, John was participating in a conversation in which someone asserted that if a recipient wants to receive all the spam sent her way, her email provider should allow for that.

Here's John's response, which beautifully nails down the overwhelming influence of cost on email providers' spam filtering policies:

Hi. I belong to a club of people who are trying to prove the existence of God by finding patterns in random data. To do this we need to mail around 100GB files of white noise. They never show up, and when I call my ISP to complain, all I get is gobbledygook about limits to attached sighs or something like that.

If I'm paying for the account, they should be allowing it thru.

Sure, baby, as long as you don't birth a cow when you receive your next bill.

3 Responses to “You can't have the spam you don't pay for”

  1. lofi said on February 27th, 2007 at 03:19 AM
    Wait, there *are* for-pay e-mail providers/ISPs with mandatory (inbound) spam filters? What sort of banana republic enterprises were they talking about? :)
  2. Anonymous said on February 27th, 2007 at 03:24 AM
    Totally bru. More of the same.
  3. Sheldon Hearn said on February 27th, 2007 at 03:37 AM
    @lofi:

    Sure there are. For example, I'm currently resolving a deliverability issue for a customer.

    Their connection attempts to MSN's MX servers time out. When MSN consider a server a spam source, they don't even accept connections from it.

    Since the connections aren't accepted, MSN can't know who the mail is for, so they can't allow users to opt out of this level of antispam protection.

    I believe Microsoft operate in a banana republic called the United States of America. ;-)

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