Instead of bitching about ORBS (which certainly behaves sub-optimally), I'd like to suggest that we discuss how a 'better' spam blocklist could be operated. Who knows - maybe someone could set one up to follow good practices. Under the right circumstances, high-quality information can drive out bad. [For the record, I'm not as exercised about email spam as are many people - it takes me less time each day to trash the electronic junk mail than it does to sort out the paper kind, despite an internet presence stretching back decades, and posting to both mailing lists and Usenet with my real address. My main objection to spam is that I don't want sexually explicit email arriving in my 10 year old daughter's inbox]. I'd like to suggest that if ORBS gave a little more information about *why* a given site was listed, and sites where thus able to implement their own policies over what parts of the list to use, then that would be a far more equitable situation. For example, instead of just saying 'Don't accept mail from X. ...it gave a reason (here is a non-exhaustive list). * X maintains an unlimited open relay. * X blocks our attemps to check it. * Spam has come from X in the last month. * X maintains an open relay, but the the owner has implemented spam throttling measures. ... then the system would be much more acceptable. ------------------- BTW, I expect that it should be possible to spam-proof an open relay, by tinkering very slightly with the protocol implementation. For example: if a server required a 10 second pause between successive RCPT commands, then a message to a single recipient would pass without problems, but a spammer trying to send to many people would be blocked. There are *many* other ways to tinker with the protocol implementations which would let legitimate users send mail without difficulty, using normal agents, but which would make the spammers' life far more difficult. Peter Trei