>>And all this time I thought the goal was to construct a _small_ list,
>>by convincing people to get their systems _off_ the list.
>
>Well, that is a desirable side effect, but an unfortunate number of people
>are still operating under the delusion that there is some advantage to
>running mail servers as open relays that can be hijacked massively by
>spammers.
>
>Over time, the size of that set is declining however, as more and more
>have their servers crashed by spammers and/or have to deal with a sudden
>massive influx of hate mail in the wake of a spmming/hijacking event.
This may seem odd but we had the spam relay problem occur here and had
our server hosed a few times, but we never experienced the expected
sudden massive influx of hate mail. We had less than a dozen even for
the largest weekend-long incidents and most of these were politely
written. In fact 99.999% of the sudden influx of mail was bounces due
to the spammer's list being full of invalid addresses.
-Mitch
