> whois.denic.de requires a magic denic-specific option before it
> is willing to return any data.
Have you tried
	whois uni-bonn.de
recently? Or what exactly are you talking about?

> The German people, via their (supposedly-)representative government,
> have chosen to act in a way that I consider uncivilized.
Whatever that has to do with Denic's whois handling: in the 2008 federal
elections, the three parties that form our current government got 48.4%
of the relevant votes. So about half of the german people are not
supporting that government, let alone Denic's whois handling.

> indeed, as one of their constitutents, they exist to serve you.
> (In theory.  It would not surprise me if they, like many governmental
> entities, lost sight of that.)
Denic, to my knowledge, is not a governmental entity.

> The latter is especially weak; there are plenty of places willing
> to set you up with a mail tunnel to a civilized mailserver.
I am already using a civilized mailserver (or, in fact, two of them).
Of course they run NetBSD.

> "Special"?
Read: Selected according to receipient.

> If I were saddled with such a case, where I had an email address
> that were broken somehow, I just wouldn't use it;
You're the first person to regard my email address broken.
Other recipents may, for various resons, regard other possible email
addresses of mine broken. So I would end up in selecting my email
address according to the recipient's perception of brokeness.

> I'd set up something with a civilized provider,
I'm working for the University of Bonn. Consequently, my work email
address is under the uni-bonn.de domain. Since I use NetBSD professionally,
I use that email address when posting to the NetBSD lists.

> or even just run my own email.
You may be surprised that I'm doing that already. In fact, I'm even paid
for, amongst other things, running the email of math.uni-bonn.de.
But since that's my job, I couldn't choose the domain even if I wanted to.