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...