Back on 2010-03-15, I wrote here about how CIRA was apparently incompetent to both create and send mail.
Recently, I was flipping through saved blocked mail for other reasons and happened to see mail from CIRA. Things have changed.
They no longer appear to be using ratware to send their mail; the SMTP syntax errors have gone away. This much is good.
Unfortunately, it's about all that's good. They are still marking their mail
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="UTF-8"
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bitbut putting non-7-bit octets in
it.
They also exhibit other curious problems; for example, they do not accept feedback any way other than via the Web, but appear completely blind to the obvious fact that this means they are systematically ignoring the opinions of anyone (like me) to whom the Web is difficult and unpleasant enough to use that jumping through their obnoxious hoops just isn't worth it. Even though there are plenty of other, technically equally suitable, alternatives, such as accepting comments by email. Even paper mail—someone has to read each response and boil them down anyway.
Presumably they don't care about us, since everybody knows the Web is really just another name for the Internet; we obviously don't know what we're talking about.