And I also suspect this is partly why legitimate correspondence from Russia is not getting to you. Due to the abundance of spam coming from Russia, overzealous spam filters probably also block an abnormally large proportion of legitimate e-mail messages.

Yes, you can sign up for free accounts on Russian servers. I recently obtained mail.ru and tut.by (Belarus) email accounts — with the aid of a Belarusian friend who did the sign-ups for me, as the interfaces are naturally entirely in Russian. Both are POP accounts, but I have found it possible, if a bit chancy, to navigate the webmail interfaces by guesswork.

Why? To find out why emails sent to me from Eastern Europe often don’t reach me via my American ISP-provided mail server and/or to provide a more viable alternative.

So far, these services have been fine, no problem — less than with my name-brand ISP mail.

As you mentionned, not all Russians are bad, and some Canadian, American and European hackers do as much harm as Russian hackers.

sol: Part of the clues that I was being hacked yesterday was a short flurry of new user registrations with .ru e-mail addresses. I have been getting such user registrations regularly for a long time (I usually delete a new user if his/her registration is not quickly followed by a first blog comment), but I never associated it with hacking attempts. Yesterday, however, the two definitely occurred at the same time, which makes me think that they are linked.

Unfortunately, lots of on-line hacking and spamming takes place through Russian servers. That does not mean that all Russians are bad, of course :). But it does seem that Russia has become something of a haven for on-line “terrorists.”

Luckily, it happened only once, and I added that address to my rule in Mail : «Direct à la corbeille» (Directly to trash).

Let’s hope this won’t happen again. Good luck with the new measures, Pierre !

I’m beginning to think that the internet’s days are numbered, at least as an open medium.