From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>
...
Look. Could we stop arguing about something that actually can be
determined quite easily?
Could someone please contact Yahoo and Hotmail and ask them two very
simple questions.
"Of the local email addresses at which you have seen excessively
heavy bounces, what percentage used to exist and what percentage
never existed? And of those that used to exist, what percentage were
closed do to spamming?"
Someone here must have a contact there?
Many times over the last several years people known to be working there
have been asked in public for that information. The response has been so
deafeningly silent that I assume that it reflects corporate policy.
I theorize is that if the public knew that a significant number of
what Hotmail calls "forged" addresses were not in any honest sense
forged, then even more people would refuse all mail from the free
providers and fewer people would sell their "eyeballs" for "free"
mailboxes. This theory works whether you think (as I do) that most
envelope or header From values pointing to free providers are valid
at the start of a spew or if you think only 3% are valid. In either
case there is so much spam with perfectly legitimate free provider
return addresses that anyone with any sense avoids the free providers
as sender or recipient.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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