>My experience with the RBL has been exclusively negative to date.

>a well meant but incompetent attempt at improving the situation

I do not mean to dismiss your frustration, but I wonder if you are comparing the present situation to an unobtainable ideal.

Yes, email worked great in the early 1990s. (E.g., most people who ran the net-news infrastructure demanded that there be a working email address in the From field of every message, and I cannot recall anyone back then disagreeing with that demand.)

But the internet is drastically different now. We cannot just go back to the way it was.