rlsnyder asks:
"I'm the inadvertant co-administrator of e-mail a for company that relies pretty heavily on it for daily business (e.g. sending confirmations of financial transactions). At one point in the not-too-distant past, our server was an open relay. I admit I'm a sinner for letting it happen, and I'm ready to do my pennance. Given the relatively low volume of mail our server moved that did not originate from inside, I doubt I was a major contributor to the world of SPAM. In any event, we've been blacklisted on a number of sites. Some lists have reasonable policies, and we've since been removed. Other places are a little more arbitrary as to removal policies, and although I can prove we're not a relay, we're still listed." While I approve of the basic concept of SPAM Blacklists, there are dozens of SPAM blacklists out there who are real keen on adding open relays to the list, but not so keen on taking rehabilitated hosts out. I would posit that SPAM blacklists that are not properly maintained are a part of the problem, not the solution. What are your thoughts on the subject?
rlsynder continues: "Am I way off base here, or is this self-appointed mail police thing going in the wrong direction? Given that I can't reliably deliver e-mail to a number of places due to being blocked, I've got a big exposure. Is this making spam less of a problem, or are we trading one problem (SPAM) for another (the reliablility of proper maintenance of SPAM Blacklists)?
I could draw a bunch of analogies here, but isn't the bottom line that no one owns the internet e-mail system? I realize no one makes ISP's subscribe to the blacklists, but basically, I'm trying to move data from one point to another, and some machines in the middle are discriminating against my data because a corrected, perfectly legal system configuration error. How is this helping? Has SPAM really decreased universally thanks to these lists?"
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I like the idea of something like MAPS-RBL, but I think many of them are bad hacks put together by guys who take the spam thing as a holy crusade. I don't really have a problem with that, its a free country, you do what you want.
However I fault ISPs for using them without understanding their policies. Many ISPs use these small-time black-holes because they don't want to use MAPRBL (I assume its a money thing at this point). And if you get listed, how do you know that you're listed? You don't until somebody calls somebody and says "I can't get mail through to you". There needs to be a better way.
And some sites, its not worth getting delisted. "www.joes.antispam.site.com" isn't worth the effort one way or the other.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
ordb.org is a great site for this. They are very professional with both addition of servers, and subtraction of them. My mail server was an open relay for a time till I got an email from them saying that I was blacklisted. I quickly fixed the server, and submitted that my site be checked again, the next day I was taken off their lists, very easy. They run about 20 tests connecting to your server and sending e-mails for the most common way of sending spam. Also, as they say in their faq that they reload their lists every hour to get servers off it quickly. Well done!
I'd just like to give some props for SpamAssassin.
If you haven't heard of it, it's an elegant system that assigns a weight to each email message based on hundreds of different tests, and if the email scores over 5 (configurable), it is marked as spam.
One of the nice things about it that is it uses most of the email blacklists, but they're only worth ~2 points, so being in a blacklist alone isn't enough to kill a message. That's good for those blacklists that throw far too many people in that don't belong (osirusoft). It also uses razor, but that is only worth three points, so if someone is piping bugtraq to razor-report (that happened for a while) you won't lose all that email.
There's a really interesting set of tests (it's fun to read them) each with an obscure set of points including:
HTML with a non-white bgcolor (1.2)
Claims conformance to obscure spam law (1.0)
HTML mail with no text portion (3.33)
Various spam phrases (various points depending on how many "hits" there are)
Subject ends in an exclamation point (0.5)
The points have apparently been calculated using some program to give the best accuracy.
Anyway, SpamAssassin is the best of the spam removal programs I've seen. Give it a shot!
Your problem is twofold. First, while you've cleaned up your open relay, plenty of spammers and spam-friendly hosts make the same claim and lie (Rule #1: Spammers lie). So you may have to be patient.
More importantly, your server ip may now be sitting in hundreds of private blacklists of mail servers whose admins don't like to use the centralized lists, and just reject/blackhole spammers on their own. It is the presence of well-trusted centralized blacklist services that gives you even the hope of ever having decent communication, because without them, you'd get into a thousand tiny blacklists and never get out.
(P.S. Note that if you're checking your status using the rblcheck tool at http://relays.osirusoft.com, it will tell you about a lot of blacklists that are not intended to be publicly used and not part of the usual osirusoft dnsbl, as well...)
[Running an open relay is] like being ticketed for driving your car down the wrong side of the road at 90 miles per hour and then being pissed off that the cop did not provide you with free driving lessons and give you 10-15 days to stop driving like that.
Nice analogy, except that it doesn't work. If you're driving at 90 miles an hour on the wrong side of the road, then (1) your speedometer will tell you that you're driving at 90 miles an hour and (2) looking ahead will show you which side of the street you're on, which you can tell is the wrong side because of what you had to know to pass the test to get your driver's license.
With mail servers, however, there isn't, at least yet, any widespread tool that will tell you if you have an open relay (and given how such tools work, they'll probably be banned as "hacker tools" at the rate things are going these days). In fact, I found out recently that I'd been placed on a blacklist for having an open relay, which took me by surprise because I'd been careful to avoid having anything like that happen; it turned out that I had missed one of the potential avenues of abuse (specifically, using error bounces to spam people).
So until running a (secure!) mail server becomes as simple as driving a car and people need licenses to run servers, your analogy is inappropriate.