I dont hold any brief for goodmail - and nor is my criticism of the "dearaol.com" campaign really an endorsement that goodmail is a good product. I think its a decent idea in certain limited circumstances (transactional email gets auth'd, and certified for reputation .. and the rest of its benefits - message delivery tracking - are not my concern, theyre the concern of senders using that product, delivering to ISPs using goodmail)

But its not blackmail, its not an email tax, its nothing to do with an "internet cost contract"

I do think the EFF is way out in left field on most of its posts about spam over the last several years. And at least some of the tactics adopted by the EFF and supporters (including moveon.org) have tended towards pure FUD .. the first and very simple step being to cite examples of bad spam filtering - yes there are quite a few, and then tar every single spam filtering effort with the same brush (take a bow, Cindy and Annalee.. spreading FUD doesnt become any more right just because its done in the supposed cause of free speech)

Or, as John Gilmore does, run an open relay - and now, an open socks proxy, and claim its all for free speech and that John Perry Barlow cant send out email any other way when he's traveling somewhere in Africa. Surely someone who could write tar way back when can compile a mailserver that does smtp auth. And unless John Perry also needs a socks4 proxy to do his browsing when he's in Africa, I guess the proxy running on radio.toad.com could be turned off - it was being used to mailbomb the full-disclosure list with thousands of posts just the other day.

Yes - not your fault, Brad, I know that. But finding clue about spam issues in the EFF is getting really very rare. Forget clue, finding people who want to engage in a reasoned dialog instead of scoring cheap political points, is getting even rarer.

I know you can do far better than that. I wish you would do far better than that.