I recently booked a rental car on Priceline.com, thinking I had saved a few dollars. I always make sure I uncheck any obscure checkboxes during the checkout process so that I don’t inadvertently provide legitimation for sending me unwanted emails.
Today, hardly a week later, I got several hundreds of emails from Priceline. Continue reading
I guess it was too good to be true. A phone that does everything that I want and need and could possibly ask for and is not an iPhone? Not the Nexus One. Or at least, not yet. Mine went on eBay today, and I hope that I will be at least able to get back what I paid for (Google hits you with a stiff restocking fee, so sending it back isn’t really an option).
Bye-Bye Nexus One
The deal-breakers for me:
Bye-bye Nexus One!
Or so I thought. 3 days later and with 5 hours to go, with lots of watchers but no bids, I ended the auction early and decided to keep the phone for good. I have work-arounds for the lacking calendar sync (Google Outlook sync on both my work laptop and my home PC) and the Pop3 issues (IMAP). I will have an edge on the iPhone, at least until next week when 4.0 will be revealed 
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The effectiveness of black-listing mail servers is questionable. The overall spam volume does not appear to be impacted and keeps going up. The argument that the amount of spam would rise faster without blacklisting is nonsense. Blacklisting affects a very small percentage of emails that are in a gray zone between spam and ham, such as emails that I send to a personal mailing list with 50 members.
The large professional spammers probably only laugh about blacklisting efforts. With botnets distributed worldwide to millions of computers, there is no longer a need to rely on individual senders.
So why do big players like GoDaddy still engage in email blacklisting? One side effect of large providers blocking the IP addresses of small providers is that they are hurting the small providers’ business. Customers are unhappy, and since there is no solution for the small provider to permanently get their mail servers unblocked by the large providers, customers will eventually move their account to the large provider.
Blacklisting of email servers hurts the competition in the provider market. It is a tool that drives small providers out of the market, and will lead to a consolidation that is not good for consumers.
