John R. Levine writes:

> Before you sue, it would be a good idea to read 47 USC 230, a Federal
> law that specifically blocks services and software that block 
> offensive
> material, with offensive broadly defined.  It protects "good faith"
> attempts at blocking, even if they block stuff by mistake.

Forgive me if this has been covered to death; I'm back from vacation, and
slogging through the several thousand emails, 85% of which are spam.

With Spews, Osirusoft, and other published blocklists, keep in mind that
they don't really block anything. All they are is published lists of
machines that spam, machines that support spam, or machines included in
netblocks which spam. Disregarding for a moment the controversy over that
last item (blocking machines who are merely neighbors of spammers, fellow
customers of ISPs that allow spam), that's all these services are -- lists.
SPEWS has never blocked an email. It can't; it's not involved in the
transmission of email at all. It's other ISPs who consult these lists to
decide which hosts to refuse to accept email from that are doing the
blocking. 

So if example.com refuses to accept email from you because you're listed in
SPEWS, SPEWS isn't blocking you, example.com is. 

And (IANAL) I think you'll have a great deal of trouble convincing anyone
anywhere that they are obligated to receive any email from you or anyone
else if they don't want to. If for instance I want to refuse all email from
Brazil, or from people named Alfred, or with message IDs that are even
numbers, or that contain the word "contain", or for any reason at all
sensible or otherwise, I can do so. My inbox, my rules, after all.

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