Last Month for Free MAPS

MAPS has posted that it will be requiring a subscription fee starting in August. The note hasn't shown up on its PR page yet, but the readers of news.admin.net-abuse.email and SPAM-L are already finding it very interesting. I've included a copy below, along with selected commentary from those two forums. Anyone know more?

Path: ...!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news.isc.org!not-for-mail
From: Margie <margie@mail-abuse.org>
Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email
Subject: MAPS Subscription Policy Changes
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 16:45:11 -0700
Organization: Internet Software Consortium
Message-ID: <nidsktsnci3cat0blc31qtanprifmek97v@4ax.com>

Effective Midnight 7/31/2001, all non-subscription access to MAPS services will cease. Anyone wishing to transfer or query MAPS data must have a signed contract with MAPS, and have access enabled in our ACL. There are several reasons for this change:

1) The data in the MAPS files belongs to MAPS and is copyrighted. MAPS, RBL, RBL+, DUL and RSS are all service marks of MAPS. MAPS must have the ability to protect its assets from unauthorized use or disclosure by third parties.

2) As MAPS popularity grew, the demand on our resources grew. We have continually upgraded systems, software, and added servers where necessary. The end result is our systems and connectivity are sufficient enough that providers have no incentive to pay for zone transfer subscriptions. When MAPS began to offer paid subscriptions, we believed that allowing access based on the ability to pay would allow the largest percentage of the net to access the services, while permitting MAPS to sustain itself with subscriptions from the large users of the services. What we have found instead is that we are our own worst "competition".

3) The economic conditions in the industry have hit everyone, including MAPS. MAPS' purpose is to stop spam on the internet. That purpose can only be achieved as long as MAPS can maintain itself as a corporation. Like any corporation, that takes income. There is very little debate about the effectiveness of the MAPS lists. This effectiveness saves its users time, bandwidth and other resources as well as giving them an added value to their customers by reducing the amount of spam the customer sees in their inbox. MAPS can simply no longer afford to foot the bill for the bulk of the internet community.

It is not our intent to put the use of the MAPS lists out of reach of the individual or hobby site. We will still offer some reduced fee or free query contracts under limited circumstances.

As usual, please direct requests for contracts to subscription-request@mail-abuse.org, questions and comments to margie@mail-abuse.org and flames to dev/null. ;)

--
Margie Arbon Mail Abuse Prevention System, LLC
Manager, Market and Business Development
margie@mail-abuse.org http://mail-abuse.org

Here are excerpted reader comments from SPAM-L and nanae which I found interesting:

"...people can no longer pass the buck when it comes to effectively blocking unwanted crap; they will have to now assume the responsibility for handling their own E-mail. I actually think that this is going to be a good thing for the long term." (Sam Varshavchik)

"...and so dies MAPS. You've just cut your own throats. The effectiveness of MAPS always depended on the number of users, which is now going to be a fraction of a percentage of what it was before." (John Oliver)

"I was under the impression that MAPS want a big number of subscribers, in order to have some force behind them when they educate and negotiate with spammers. Isn't that the reason big spamhausen like UUNet were not blacklisted, since many subscribers would stop using MAPS's tools because of too much collateral damage? Now MAPS is reducing its customer base. But perhaps we can now get eBay, UUnet and Qwest blacklisted, since only a small number of administrators will use MAPS tools..." (Karl-Henry Martinsson)

"...if the RBL listees think the RBL is a bitch, let them see what happens when they get dropped into who knows how many individual filters that won't get reviewed for removals until Hell freezes over. I think there is some serious potential for us to ALL gain from this move." (Jim Higgins)

"Anyway, now that the MAPS RBL user base has been reduced by at least a factor of 10, the mainsleaze spambags are not going to even CARE about MAPS. ... So the mainsleaze spambags are going to let loose on the remaining 92-96%. ... The way I look at it, Joe Sixpack is now going to see more spam than he's ever seen before. I think that a lot of Joe Sixpacks are going to get seriously pissed, and a fair amount of them are going to explore ways to effectively spamproof their INBOXes. This is a GOOD thing." ("Sam")

My own prediction: in the long run, this has no big effect on spam either way. Two things will reduce the hassle of spam, more legislation, or supplanting SMTP with a non-broken mail protocol. Costs have to be attached to sending mail to strangers, either micropayments or risk of jail. As long as mail's dirt-cheap to send, spam will be vying for our attention, scurrying-around clean-up crews notwithstanding.

Until SMTP is replaced, the great spam fight is a bunch of Libertarians trying to solve the tragedy of the commons. A pay-per-view clique seems like a suboptimal solution to me.

Comments

Alan Cox predicited this last year

[Tet]

When above.net were hassling ORBS last year, Alan Cox mentioned that it was looking suspiciously like Vixie was planning to take MAPS commercial. See the July 17th entry in his diary.

MAPS did not block most spam

[Kiwi]

In my experience with setting up Spam filters, I have found that RBL-filtering email was very ineffective in blocking spam.

I have a fairly complicated spam filter set up for my clients, which works something like this:

BCC filter -> MAPS rbl filter -> regex filter

Until fairly recently, the BCC filter was the most effective filter for getting rid of spam. Lately, with the proliferation of DSL, spammers now have the bandwidth to send out one email per recipient, making the BCC filter less effective.

The RBL filter is very ineffective (and yes, it includes the DUL and other lists). Spammers know that a large number of sites use these filters, so they perform "hit and run" spamming, finding open mail relays to rape.

The regex filter is becoming the most effective spam filter.

Not to mention a software package I wrote.

- Sam

And there we have it...

[Erik Hensema]

We, the recipients of spam, now actually have to pay to NOT receive spam.

Thank you very much spammers, and die.

Alternatives to MAPS and ORBS

[Skapare]

Here are some up and coming alternatives:

• http://www.orbl.org/
• http://www.ordb.org/
• http://www.orbz.org/
• http://relays.osirusoft.com/
• http://orbs.gst-group.co.uk/

I also have my mail server configured to reject mail from other mail servers that do not have their IP addresses correctly configured and/or delegated in the in-addr.arpa reversed DNS zone. Amazingly, this has cut out almost as much spam as MAPS has. For Postfix users, this can be done with:

smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks reject_unknown_client permit

While this does end up rejecting a few "legitimate" servers, the number is very small. I suspect that for the most part this works because open relays tend to be the result of "inadequate administration" which can also be the cause of the lack of reverse DNS. If they can't get one of them right, they probably can't get the other right.

Screw Your Competition Then Charge Money

[cluge]

Does this sound like Microsoft or what? Lets compare shall we?

MS tries to buy you or puts you out of business by stealing your product/idea and then incorperating it into Windows for "Free"

MAPS and the network that it runs routinely and IMHO illegally injected false routes into the global routing table so that ORBS was unavailable so ONLY their "free" service is accessable. See MAPS vs ORBS

MS: is now going with a subscription fee for it's software. All that "free stuff" it added to your OS which may or may not work properly now has to be paid for monthly!

MAPS: With the competition driven into the ground, you suddenly have to PAY for MAPS. (You mean they couldn't mirror those zone files on several servers across many networks that would be willing to do so for free??)

Sad, we see here dishonesty, trickery and stupidity win over the better product, and/or the better idea.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth"

Re:vigilantes

[pjrc]

This is bull. If you got listed your a spammer or an open relay.

There have been numerous well known cases where MAPS created an entire netblock against "spam friendly" ISPs, in an attempt to put pressure on that ISP to change its policy and stop selling bandwidth or other services to spammers. This tactic has the effect of blocking all of that ISPs customers, spammers and legitimate businesses and users alike. Not long ago, slashdot ran a story about peacefire.org and others getting blocked by MAPS.

Your belief that everything listed by MAPS must be spammers is clearly false if examples can be shown where non-spammers have been blocked, and I believe that link above is just such an example.

Even without a hard example, it's a well known fact that MAPS uses large netblocks against entire ISPs who they consider "spam friendly", without any regard for the other innocent bystanders who just happen to be other (unsuspecting) customers of that ISP.

These services would not be worth squat if they did not work as advertised.

It is debatable how effective MAPS is. In this C/net article MAPS blocked very few spams and also blocked many non-spam messages. MAPS was the only spam blocking service among the ones tested that blocked non-spam messages. That C/net ran a test and found MAPS to block a significant number of non-spam messages further shows how naive it is to blindly trust MAPS.

I suspect that time will shortly prove that MAPS is in fact "not worth squat". Such questionable effectiveness coupled together with blocking legitimate emails isn't great from a free service, but when you're paying your expectations change.

I don't get it

[Aceticon]

I've been around the Net for some time now, and i've seen it go from purely academic to (almost) purely commercial (yep, when AOL gave their costumers access to the Internet it was the beginning of the end).

I've seen the fall of Usenet (information to noise ratio is now about 1-10 in most groups) and the raise of spamming...

Do i get spam on my e-mail account? - Nope.

How?

I have three e-mail accounts:

• One for my friends and my informal humor mailing lists and official stuff (note: subscriptions to banana-girls-with-big-breasts.com sort of sites does not count as official). I never put this address in any public forum (that includes /.).
  Number of spams per-month = zero
• The other one is at work. I only use it for work related stuff. When i change companies this one changes but my friends can always get me through the other one (for all the other ones, well - if you don't have my personal e-mail that means i don't want to hear from you again). I never publish this one in public forums.
  Number of spams per-month = zero
• The last one is my public e-mail. I'll look at it maybe once a week. I'll use it publicly (although i still refrain myself from using it "as is" in Usenet - beter transform it so that humans can understand the real one but not e-mail address collection programs). Registration to any moderatly crappy site involves using this one. For extra crappy sites i just create a new one in Hotmail.
  Number of spams per-month = about 10 to 20

So, after all my gloating about my own cunningness, what's the conclusion:

Levels of privacy!!!
Set up e-mail accounts the same way as you set up your life: friends; work; everybody else

It works!

MAKE MONEY FAST!!!!! 8--))))

[leuk_he]

From: Margie "margie@mail-abuse.org"

Effective Midnight 7/31/2001, all non-subscription access to MAPS services will cease. Anyone wishing to transfer or query internet data must read the rest of this mail.

Send us and the following 6 people on the ACL list 1 DOLLAR. Then add your name to the ACL list and send it to everyone you know. you get rich in a few days day and receive no more spam at the same time!

Some testimony of users :

"i did not pay ...and so dies . You've just cut your own throats. The effectiveness of MAPS always depended on the number of users, which is going to be paid out now. If you do not pay MAPS and the world arroudn will die (John Oliver) ,

"MAPS want a big number of subscribers....aministrators will use MAPS ..." (Karl-Henry Martinsson)

"This is a GOOD thing." (Sam)

Margie "mail" Arbon. Abuse Prevention System, TM Manager, Market and MAKE MONEY FAST Development.

Confusing

[ColdGrits]

"The data in the MAPS files belongs to MAPS and is copyrighted. ".

OK, correct me if I am wrong, but the data in MAPS are built up from a lot of user-submissions reporting open relays and spammers etc.

So how come it is OK for MAPS to claim copyright and charge for access to community-submitted data, but NOT OK for CDDB to do exactly the same thing?

&nbsp--

Last Month for Free MAPS - Not

[MargieA]

MAPS has announced that this is the last month for non-subscription access to our lists. As stated in the announcement:

"We will still offer some reduced fee or free query contracts under limited circumstances."

Individual users and hobbyists can still obtain access to the lists for free. There is simply some paperwork involved. Not for profits, educational institutions, etc., are eligible for substantial discounts. It is not our intent to deny access to our services because of the inability to pay for a subscription. Those that can afford to pay are being required to do so.

Incidently, the cost for most ISPs would equate to about $0.05 per user per year .