Sympatico Admin wrote:

Hi Larry,

We have determined that you have be trying set your email program to be anonymous; ie forging your return address. If you wish to be anonymous then get a free email account with hotmail.com or rocketmail.

Dan, The Sympatico Netscape software you provide has features that allow the user to choose not to give out their email address to those that they wish to keep it from, such as spammers, criminals and sex-shop operators. I have not been made aware of any Sympatico policy which requires your users to make themselves vulnerable to anyone and everyone who has connections to the InterNet.

Your forged reply-to addresses 'fred@dev.null' get rejected by our email system and sit in our mail queue.

My chosen reply-to addresses at 'dev.null' are a traditional UNIX method of directing files and email to /dev/null, which is the equivalent of the Trash Bin on a Mac. You seem to have set up your UNIX system to emulate a Win95 Recycle Bin, in that it assumes that the user doesn't know what he or she is doing, so saves deleted items. Dev.null addresses are designed to get rejected by the email system, so it seems rather useless to keep them in your mail queue.

Also please do not set your email program to relay through someone else's server in another domain as there have been complaints. We do not allow this to be done from anyone outside our domain.

You will have to explain to me what exactly you are talking about here, as it is unclear to me what you are referring to. Please forward me copies of the complaints.

Please note: this note is being sent to our security dept. as we deem this type of activity to be mis-use of the mail system and as such you could loose your access privleges.

Since this seems to be of such serious concern to you, I would certainly appreciate it if you could explain to me in greater detail exactly what it is about my use of my account that Sympatico has a policy problem with, and why.

If you have any question or concerns then please reply to this note!

I notice that your reply to address, 'Sympatico Admin <deckd>', is not a valid InterNet email address. Is this an internal system address? Toto