K. Parkin is not likely to blame. This is becoming common practice these days, in fact, in today's edition of Jesse Berst's Anchordesk, an email newsletter from PC Magazine, Jesse decries this trend ot banning whole domains. Unfortunately, all the free ISP's such as Geocities are commonly hijacked by the spammers, who keep establishing new accounts every time their old ones are deleted for spamming activity. My friend has recently changed to a cable ISP here in Toronto (Shaw Wave), and was horrified last week to be notified that his ISP will block all mail forwared to the mail servers by a Bigfoot account (like me, he publishes only his Bigfoot address). For those who don't know, Bigfoot is a permanent email address service where you get a single email address that reroutes your mail behind the scenes to your physical email address. This allows you to avoid all the hassles inherent in changing your email account, since the address you publish to the outside world never changes. Unfortunately, Bigfoot has been a favourite target of the spammers, first CyberPromotions (the worst Spammer of them ALL!) forged millions of messages so they looked like they came from a Bigfoot address, and more recently unscrupulous Bigfoot members have been guilty of massive amounts of spam, choking servers with hundreds of thousands of unsolicited emails. As a long time Bigfoot user, this is very distressing to me, but so far my ISP has not banned redirection from a Bigfoot account, and the ISP I am switching to next month (Rogers Wave) assures me they currently has no intention of blocking mail that has been routed via Bigfoot. The real solution is to defeat the Spammers, either by CONSISTENT legislation or other means, but for now, if you send a message to someone and it gets blocked by an antispam filter, try posting a short message here to notify the intended recipient of the problem. They probably don't even know about it, and by informing them they can try to take action. CIAO - Martin Green PS. As you can see, when I post to a list like this, I alter my return address so spambots cannot capture my real email address. You might try doing the same to bypass antispam software that is rejecting your return address. PPS. Check out the Jesse Berst column at: http://www.zdnet.com/chkpt/adt0224ba/www.anchordesk.com/story/story_1803.html On Tue, 24 Feb 1998 19:54:27 -0800, Alex Holden wrote: >Earlier I sent a message to K.Parkyn@sct.gu.edu.au in reply to his query >about TCM3105 modem chips. It was bounced back at me with the error >message "552 ... We don't accept spam". >If you want people to help with your query, maybe you should reconsider >indiscriminately banning whole domains... >Note that I am strongly against the use of unsolicited commercial email, >but I do think it is going too far when you start banning whole domains >from sending messages to you. Martin R. Green elimar@NOSPAMbigfoot.com To reply, remove the NOSPAM from the return address. Stamp out SPAM everywhere!!!