Mail Archives: cygwin/2002/08/06/01:29:21
On 6 Aug 2002 at 0:16, Michael Hoffman wrote:
> You have identified the problem. Hotmail is not setting the References
> field. You might point this out to Microsoft. Personally I would stop
> using Hotmail. There ought to be a "Hotmail Considered Harmful" web page
> but until then, check out:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=site:theregister.co.uk+hotmail
>
> for dozens of Hotmail Horror Stories.
What alternatives are there, though, if you want a *free throwaway*
address that you can dump if the spam gets to be too much? Every
other free email provider I know of either doesn't provide a means to
archive messages on your own machine or charges money for that
ability, and none tend to exist in an unchanged or steadily improving
form for more than a year or two. The only truly reliable option
seems to be to get your own domain name and set up your own MX node;
after that's done you can create mail accounts or aliases on your
system all you please and change them freely whenever spam gets to be
a problem, but the initial setup costs money (around $100 for the
domain name, the last time I checked, plus more to upgrade to a
broadband connection so as to have a fixed IP for it to point to) and
it requires the overhead of maintaining an actual SMTP server,
patching it and making it proof against spammer exploitation and all
that. An awful lot of work just to be capable of dodging spam...
Incidentally, since I posted to this mailing list the amount of spam
coming to this email address has increased. This is all the fault of
that news server that shall not be named, of course -- if it had been
working I could read and post via that using a throwaway Hotmail
address as my contact address and using xnews, but oh no, I have to
subscribe to the list and there's no way I could subscribe a Hotmail
account to a high volume list and be able to manage it, as Hotmail is
too damn slow and too limited in its capacity...thus I had to
subscribe my main email, and as a result a) it's getting more spam,
which is an irreversible condition without my paying money, and b) it
allowed some stupid flamer with too much time and a surgical scar
where her conscience was once excised when it got dangerously
inflamed to cross-reference my postings to a stupid ancient document
written years ago by another stupid flamer who survived the exact
same surgical procedure and turn this whole mailing list into an even
bigger nightmare than it already was... I wonder how much bandwidth
would have been saved in both mailing list flames and off-list spam
if only that &#^! news server had functioned as advertised...
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