talison

I used postfix-policyd for a while. I whitelisted the major email providers. You can also run the policy daemon in 'training mode' for a while.

http://www.policyd.org/tiki-index.php?page=Greylisting&s...

I still had the same problems others have mentioned though, where crappy registration systems were sending their confirmation mails directly from their PHP application, rather than relaying it through a smart MTA that actually understood the SMTP protocol and would do the retry.

Ultimately, too many users complained about mail delays and missing email. This is one of those scenarios where the cost of not delivering an important email may outweigh the benefits of blocking a few more invalid ones.

Let's not rush to judge Amazon. It's not clear this is an IP address issue. This domain name has a questionable history:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070127212047/http://workstax.co...

Are you sure it was based on IP address? This domain was used to host questionable links a few years ago, including suspicious antivirus software:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/workstax.com

http://web.archive.org/web/20070127212047/http://workstax.co...

"On Writing Well" by Zinsser is also worthwhile:

http://bit.ly/2wH4VC (link to Google Books)

Maybe someone with enough karma to produce a poll on HN can submit a "Would you hire Zed Shaw?" poll.

Your comment about being asocial reminds me of a well known essay that was posted on HN a few months ago, "Caring for Your Introvert."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch

For myself, I definitely fall into the introvert category - I get fatigued fairly quickly after fairly common social interactions.

The problem is I think for a lot of us, our default mode of "chilling out" is spending time online browsing sites, checking email, reading the latest news. All of those activities provide the illusion of taking a break from the "real world" but I don't think they provide the respite we believe.

It's really easy to get agitated online about some silly flame war, techcrunch linkbait, or some offhand comment someone made about your project on twitter.

So I can see how a life offline, or the compromise of spending less time online, can certainly be beneficial.

They did respond. Kind of.

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2009/06/https-secur...

Amex. Great customer support. They also offer buyer protection program so Amex will reimburse you if the product you bought breaks or is defective up to a certain amount.

If your card number was ever stolen because of a shoddy merchant, or if you got screwed over on delayed shipping or a broken product, Amex has your back.

There's an article about pubsub here:

http://www.igvita.com/2009/06/29/http-pubsub-webhooks-pubsub...

I didn't realize this had been submitted before (by nirmal). It was hosted on a different domain in the previous submission which is why this wasn't caught as a dupe.

Anyway, you can see some of the author's comments in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542334

This is a Firefox extension that launches virtual browser instances so you don't have to have a native install. Windows only I'm afraid.

Looks great but does anyone else think the price is a bit expensive? Not that this is a great comparison, but I can buy a netbook for $299 or less these days.

Why such a up-front hardware cost when Amazon will get recurring revenue from Kindle books? Are they taking a loss on the book sales to boost downloads?

It's a good point that some spam "bots" could be human. I was running a free email site when we saw a lot of strange account creation. We had recaptcha enabled and knew it hand't been cracked.

It turned out (based on IP address analysis) that the accounts were being created by humans in the Philippines and then handed over to spammers in Dubai. Ah globalization...

If you have an efficient spam vector, it's not unusual to see low-wage humans manipulating the system to get around captcha.