gburnore@netcom.com (Gary L. Burnore) wrote:
:The remailer help documents I'm familiar with say they will act to prevent :"harrassment" through the remailer. I presume the above would be viewed by :the remailer owners as harrassment.
Interesting presumtion. Hopefully true. The ONLY difference between remailers and ISP's in this case, is that with an ISP, if you forge another's real ^^^^^ address there's at least a possibility that you can be held accountable for it. It's nothing at all to do with the CONTENT of the post. If same can be said of a remailer, ie if you get UCE based on a post made with your address as a from line the _real_ poster can be held accountable, then there is no issue.
That argument might have some validity if Netcom (your own ISP) didn't allow its own mail servers to be utilized by spammers and tell people who complain about this practice to G.F.Y. Just read some of the complaints about Netcom on the news.admin.net-abuse.email NG. If you had been "UCE baited" by someone using Netcom's mail servers, rather than those of a remailer, would you attempt to harass Netcom like you did Jeff Burchell who ran Mailmasher and the Huge Cajones Remailer? Would one of your associates at DataBasix demand that Netcom be shut down since they are unable or unwilling to stop the abuse of their servers? Would you threaten legal action to get Netcom to turn over all of their sendmail logs to you? What do you mean by "held accountable"? Having a throwaway Netcruiser account (perhaps one of many), acquired under a phony name, cancelled? You've already been informed, and admitted that it has been effective, that if you don't wish your e-mail address to appear in a From: line from a remailer you can request source blocking. It's sort of like the blocking of a/c 900 telephone numbers. If you are worried about abuse of your phone, you can request that calls to 900 numbers from your phone be blocked. You don't have to insist that they be blocked from EVERYONE'S phone just because they're a problem FOR YOU. Can you point to any equivalent safeguard against someone's e-mail address being forged through Netcom's SMTP servers, either by a Netcom user or by someone else? If not, isn't it time to make sure your own house is in order before meddling in the neighbors' houses? IMO, the remailers are already doing more to prevent what you perceive to be a problem than your own ISP is willing to do -- and this by VOLUNTEERS who are not being paid by you, or anyone, for their efforts. I also note that you're using the word "forge" again. Yet in another post from you within a day or two of this one, you claimed that you weren't concerned about forgery. Which is true? --