Revision 0020
                                                              2024-10-11
                                                              yyyy-mm-dd


Mailbox Providers have the tendency to foolishly delegate the filtering
of their users' mailboxes to third parties. This generally works with
the Mailbox Provider configuring their Mail Relays to consult remote
blacklists whenever a message is incoming. The Mail Relay will submit
the IP address and the domain name of the sender to the blacklister, and
the blacklister will reply whether the sender is blacklisted or not. If
the sender is blacklisted, the Mail Relay will drop the message and
never deliver it to the end user.

Because the message is not delivered to the end user, the end user is
simply never aware of any filtering being done. While the Mail Relay
could be configured to mark the message as Spam but still deliver it to
the end user, in practice, it is almost never done so.

If the Mail Relay would flag the message as Spam but still deliver it to
the end user and inform the end user which blacklister is responsible
for having caused the message to be flagged as Spam, the user would
become aware of the existence of the blacklister, and if this continues
to happen, the end user would soon realize that the blacklister is doing
wrong, and so, the user could report the situation to the Mail Relay's
administrator and request the removal of the blacklister; this would be
bad for the blacklister. As such, blacklisters always campaign for Mail
Relays to never deliver messages to end users. 

As more Mailbox Providers rely on the same blacklister, the more
coercive power the blacklister acquires. And so, a blacklister that is
used by large Mailbox Providers may have the ability to block a sender
from reaching millions of users.

A blacklister that wants to cause damage to a victim will place the IP
address and/or the domain name of that victim in their blacklist, and
then demands the victim to comply with their demands. If the victim
refuses to comply, the blacklister will blacklist the domain names and
IP addresses used by other users in the same network, then, the
blacklister will inform the ISP that the delisting can only be done
after the ISP has terminated the victim.  Blacklisters can therefore
cause important damages, and as a result, most ISPs will give in to the
extortionists' demands.

This situation and the centralization of the Internet have become so
bad, that it is now impractical to run an independent Mail Relay.

We have always used our own Mail Relays and have have never relied on
blacklists; we have no intention of changing this. Of course, because we
also do not cave in the demands of extortionists, some blacklisters do
not like us.

We have had a particular interest in the "Spamhaus Project", a notorious
blacklister. This blacklister went very far to have us block a web site
that was critical of them. Since then, we have been monitoring their
business and investigating their operators; in addition, we have also
been providing assistance to their victims.

We also have a list of Mailbox Providers and Mail Relays that are
knowingly relying on blacklisters :

  icloud.com
  outlook.com (msn.com, live.com, hotmail.com, ..)
  gmx.net (gmx.ch, gmx.de, mail.com)
  laposte.net
  soverin.net
  mailfence.com
  protonmail.com, protonmail.ch (very dishonest.)
  fastmail.com
  mxroute.com


If you use one of the above provider, the risk of never receiving a
reply from us, because it has been stealth blocked, is high. However,
our system now generally detects when this happens and will try to
notify you of the problem.