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Personally I don't have any problem with blacklists that use a predetemined method to add and remove offending parties. The problem I have is with organizations such as SPEWS who do not, in fact, use a standardized process for adding and removing offenders. Also, they do not appear to warn the owner of an IP block before they are added to their list. For more reasons to avoid SPEWS as a blacklist please see antispews.

How about this - you are saying that it is justifiable for terrorists to kill civilians because the country they happen to be in supports something they disagree with. Spam may be a large problem (although it's easy to block for me, since most of it is in Chinese for some reason), but that does not justify harming people who just happen to have the misfortune of being near a spammer.

How about not. That's not at all what I said. There is no equivalency between killing and being listed in SPEWS and being blocked by network operators who choose to use SPEWS.

Are you having to make up things you think I said so you have a better chance to argue against it?

I'm just going to make this point: blocking non-spammers will only hurt SPEWS in the long-run, as its current effectiveness is based on the majority of people using it. As people find that they either have to turn to some other source than SPEWS or accept that occasionally people they must communicate with cannot send them email without a whitelist, they will not think "yay, we're helping to eliminate spammers!" and instead think "Goddamned broken SPEWS thing accidently blocking valid people - remove it!"

Just imagine if the majority of people were to realize what the problem with spam really is, and join in the movement of SPEWS. The end result would be, of course, some period of time where a few people cannot communicate. But it would also force the minority who are indirectly supporting spam (by directly supporting the ISP that harbors spammers) to find a better ISP. Then the bad ISPs will go out of business or if they get a clue quick enough, change their behaviour, kick out the spammers, and be a good ISP everyone can use.

Eventually, SPEWS will have caused enough problems that no one (except a small core of vigilantes on their own servers) will use it. And then it will have no power over the vast majority of spammers. SPEWS would be more effective if it only blocked spammers and many people used it - it could help make spam an ineffective method of contacting people. Force the cost of spamming up, not the cost of happening to use an ISP that hosts a spammer. All you're going to do is create things like this, and force people against you. SPEWS does not help the cause by being a vigilante and trying to force people who have no buisness with the spammer to take action against their ISP.

SPEWS would be totally INEFFECTIVE if it just blocked the spammers. The goal would not be met. Spammers would continue to abuse mail servers unabated. ISPs would continue to provide services to them.

Spammers survive on less than %0.01 response rate. When those who won't respond anyway are blocking the spammers, they will still get most of their response from a few idiots who are influenced by them. They will still make enough money to continue spamming. They will still keep spamming their full lists and abusing everyone else's mail servers. They will still be increasing the costs of running mail servers. They will still be denying email recipients the full facility of their mail server resources.

For all I know, you may be the person who set up that site.

And those people do have a business with spammer, in an indirect way. They are in effect saying to their ISP, "we don't care if you keep the spammers, we'll keep sending you money for services and you can stay in business". If an ISP is only getting 1% of its revenue from spammers, then it will only take the fear of losing more than 1% of legitimate customers for the ISP to do the right thing. And those few that never will (I know of a couple which are 100% listed in SPEWS), need to go out of business.

Besides - which is easier: getting the ISP to drop the spammers acount, or telling people who want to communicate with you to stop using SPEWS? The path of least resistance is likely to be followed... which may include "ok, we'll just ignore the bozos using SPEWS."

People are certainly free to NOT use SPEWS. One result of that decision is a lot more spam. If you genuinely think just blocking spammers alone is going to work, then start your own blocklist service which does just that. Then see what it's like when you find that you're playing whack-a-mole with spammers changing addresses within the same ISP all the time. See what it's like tracking a moving target. See what it's like when some spammers sue you for claiming they are spammers when all they were doing is giving everyone a chance to opt out of their mailings. If your idea is the right one, then why is no one doing it?

How about this - you are saying that it is justifiable for terrorists to kill civilians because the country they happen to be in supports something they disagree with. Spam may be a large problem (although it's easy to block for me, since most of it is in Chinese for some reason), but that does not justify harming people who just happen to have the misfortune of being near a spammer.

How about not. That's not at all what I said. There is no equivalency between killing and being listed in SPEWS and being blocked by network operators who choose to use SPEWS.

Are you having to make up things you think I said so you have a better chance to argue against it?

I'm just going to make this point: blocking non-spammers will only hurt SPEWS in the long-run, as its current effectiveness is based on the majority of people using it. As people find that they either have to turn to some other source than SPEWS or accept that occasionally people they must communicate with cannot send them email without a whitelist, they will not think "yay, we're helping to eliminate spammers!" and instead think "Goddamned broken SPEWS thing accidently blocking valid people - remove it!"

Just imagine if the majority of people were to realize what the problem with spam really is, and join in the movement of SPEWS. The end result would be, of course, some period of time where a few people cannot communicate. But it would also force the minority who are indirectly supporting spam (by directly supporting the ISP that harbors spammers) to find a better ISP. Then the bad ISPs will go out of business or if they get a clue quick enough, change their behaviour, kick out the spammers, and be a good ISP everyone can use.

Eventually, SPEWS will have caused enough problems that no one (except a small core of vigilantes on their own servers) will use it. And then it will have no power over the vast majority of spammers. SPEWS would be more effective if it only blocked spammers and many people used it - it could help make spam an ineffective method of contacting people. Force the cost of spamming up, not the cost of happening to use an ISP that hosts a spammer. All you're going to do is create things like this, and force people against you. SPEWS does not help the cause by being a vigilante and trying to force people who have no buisness with the spammer to take action against their ISP.

SPEWS would be totally INEFFECTIVE if it just blocked the spammers. The goal would not be met. Spammers would continue to abuse mail servers unabated. ISPs would continue to provide services to them.

Spammers survive on less than %0.01 response rate. When those who won't respond anyway are blocking the spammers, they will still get most of their response from a few idiots who are influenced by them. They will still make enough money to continue spamming. They will still keep spamming their full lists and abusing everyone else's mail servers. They will still be increasing the costs of running mail servers. They will still be denying email recipients the full facility of their mail server resources.

For all I know, you may be the person who set up that site.

And those people do have a business with spammer, in an indirect way. They are in effect saying to their ISP, "we don't care if you keep the spammers, we'll keep sending you money for services and you can stay in business". If an ISP is only getting 1% of its revenue from spammers, then it will only take the fear of losing more than 1% of legitimate customers for the ISP to do the right thing. And those few that never will (I know of a couple which are 100% listed in SPEWS), need to go out of business.

Besides - which is easier: getting the ISP to drop the spammers acount, or telling people who want to communicate with you to stop using SPEWS? The path of least resistance is likely to be followed... which may include "ok, we'll just ignore the bozos using SPEWS."

People are certainly free to NOT use SPEWS. One result of that decision is a lot more spam. If you genuinely think just blocking spammers alone is going to work, then start your own blocklist service which does just that. Then see what it's like when you find that you're playing whack-a-mole with spammers changing addresses within the same ISP all the time. See what it's like tracking a moving target. See what it's like when some spammers sue you for claiming they are spammers when all they were doing is giving everyone a chance to opt out of their mailings. If your idea is the right one, then why is no one doing it?

I'm just going to make this point: blocking non-spammers will only hurt SPEWS in the long-run, as its current effectiveness is based on the majority of people using it. As people find that they either have to turn to some other source than SPEWS or accept that occasionally people they must communicate with cannot send them email without a whitelist, they will not think "yay, we're helping to eliminate spammers!" and instead think "Goddamned broken SPEWS thing accidently blocking valid people - remove it!"

Eventually, SPEWS will have caused enough problems that no one (except a small core of vigilantes on their own servers) will use it. And then it will have no power over the vast majority of spammers. SPEWS would be more effective if it only blocked spammers and many people used it - it could help make spam an ineffective method of contacting people. Force the cost of spamming up, not the cost of happening to use an ISP that hosts a spammer. All you're going to do is create things like this, and force people against you. SPEWS does not help the cause by being a vigilante and trying to force people who have no buisness with the spammer to take action against their ISP.

Besides - which is easier: getting the ISP to drop the spammers acount, or telling people who want to communicate with you to stop using SPEWS? The path of least resistance is likely to be followed... which may include "ok, we'll just ignore the bozos using SPEWS."

Spews randomly blocked a consulting company's netblock I worked for part-time simply because that our block was next to a "known spammer's" block. When they politely asked to be removed and pointed out that according to their own evidence file that their netblock had nothing to with spam, they were met with very hostile responses and told to essentially ditch their teleco provider because they'd never unlist anyone. They admitted that they simply block IPs in a form of "collateral damage" because they feel like it to hurt legitimate businesses so they flee their network provider. Someone mentions C&W addresses, same thing if you're getting service from Qwest. Their website makes them come off as the noble crusaders against spam, but in reality what they do is just mean-spirited, unethical and just plain wrong.

Don't use SPEWS!

See the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email to see just how the spews people treat those who politely ask for erroneous entried to be removed and PROVE they have nothing to do with spammers.

... generally doesn't cause innocent third parties distress while attempting to achieve his goals.

Using spews is going to cause third-party distress.

Are you sure you investigated exactly
what osirusoft does?
I fint it unfortunate that so many
administrators seem to put in osirusoft
as a blacklist without examing what it
does. Osirusoft combines the blackhole
listing of many many other blackhole
listings, one of which is unfortunately,
SPEWS. SPEWS in my opinion is
overzealous with blacklisting and it
is unfortunate that osirusoft includes
them in its list. To read more about
the problem, read this posting
here

here is a relavent quote...

ii. a grep on osirusoft - which yields about 1/2 the messages -
but.. when there's a false positive, there's a really good chance that
it's in this group - and of this class of false positives, there's a close
to 100% liklihood that it's SPEWS that's given the false positive

You can alos check out antispews.