> So why is it that we flinch and collectively look the other way
> when an ex-MAPS employee hints that all may not be right in the state of MAPS?

I think the real problem was incessant sniping between current and ex-employees, or even between ex-employees with differing opinions about exactly what went wrong. Much of that was not based on logic (as it might have been with the other arguing we've seen on this list), but instead on emotion.

We all worked there because we beleived in the dream. Many of you, who didn't work there, beleived in that same dream. But instead of the MAPS dream coming true, we're instead hurtling faster and faster towards the oft-prohpecied nightmare of spam having ruined e-mail entirely.

It's easy for people who worked for MAPS to feel somewhat responsible, and/or to try to assign blame -- usually on each other. It's much harder to accept that this exact result was inevitable long before any of us went to work there.

For a long while I quietly held onto some ideas that I'd had (and even suggested to others in the company), but I can see now that even had my ideas been followed, MAPS' effectiveness would still have been greatly lessed by now. Spam changed to route around the AGIS blocks, and now it's changed to route around MAPS and other dnsbl's. The reign of the almighty "technical solution" is past.