Free and Nearly Free Mail Providers

These 1431 domains seemed to have offered free or nearly free email accounts that have been mentioned in spam received at rhyolite.com, and so are in the rhyolite.com blacklist as of Mon May 17 19:55:31 MDT 2004.

This list is published to suggest that people with legitmate mail to send from these domains to rhyolite.com make other arrangements for that mail. This list is used to block mail automatically only to rhyolite.com. It says only that these domains seem to offer free or almost free mail and that objectionable mail mentioning those domains has been seen at rhyolite.com. Despite that, there have been objections to this list.

Because much unsolicited bulk mail bears return addresses pointing to these providers, this list has been extremely effective for blocking spam. For whatever reasons, it has also had a very low false positive rate. The DCC installation instructions say how to use such a list as "spam traps" with sendmail and the DCC. The main step is to add a file of lines for each domain name to your sendmail access_db database. Note that it is necessary to either white-list names of legitimate users of these providers or to remove those domain names from this list.

See also the other rhyolite.com mail abuse defenses.