Are SPAM Blacklists Unreasonable?

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?"

Comments

Real Pain

[Tadrith]

The company I work for had the same problem. As a result, we ended up having trouble getting e-mail to some of our customers. Thankfully, it was easy to get ourselves removed, but I think if people are going to use blacklists, they should also take the responsibility of keeping them maintained, both in additions and removals.

Mail servers are private property

[Tyrall]

From the article: I could draw a bunch of analogies here, but isn't the bottom line that no one owns the internet e-mail system?
This is a fallacy that continues to be propagated. I own my own mail server. The company I work for owns its mail servers. We can both decide who we want to allow to send mail to our users.

At work, we use two open relay lists; ORDB and ORBZ. Nobody forces us to use them; it's our server cluster, and our choice.
The reason we use those two systems, however, is due to the reasons pointed out in the article. Some blacklists are far too easy to get onto, or hosts are arbitrarily added by humans. The only way to get onto either of those lists is to be an open relay. The only way off is to be automatically retested and found to not be an open relay.

That's a self-solving problem (mostly)

[devphil]

Yep, that's the root of the problem: there are a number of for-free blacklists out there which are professionally managed. Those are the ones that should be used.

And as long as we publicly point out the blacklists that are being poorly run, people will stop using them, and switch to the good ones (like RBL, RSS, DUL, ORDB). The solution is not to ban or otherwise stop using blacklists, the solution is simply to (vocally) promote the ones which stay on top of the problem.

Going to get far worse before it gets better.

[Thagg]

rlsnyder asks Has SPAM really decreased universally thanks to these lists? Well, it is hard to say. Spam has increased monotonically since its inception, and it continues to grow. It is possible that blacklists have helped lower the rate of growth.

What blacklists really do is get the attention of sysadmins, and get them to take the problem seriously. I, like rlsnyder, was victimized in the same way -- our mail server was an open relay, we forwarded some spam, and got blacklisted. It took me a week or so to get it straightened out, and in the process I learned quite a bit about the UCE problem. rlsnyder similarly has been enriched by the experience, whether he agrees to that at this point or not.

One always has the option of sending mail from one of the many free mail systems. If your mail is blocked while your case is being reviewed, then send it from hotmail or someplace like that. That's what we did. In took about a week for the last of the spam reporting services to delist our site, and while it was inconvenient, it wasn't devastating. It won't be for rlsnyder, either, I trust.

The big problem is that there is nothing to stop the spammers. People who relay mail through unsuspecting companies are already criminals, they will not be dissuaded by laws. The only thing that the anti-spam community can do is to try to put a finger in all 2^32 holes in the dike, and the only way to do that is to educate people. The blacklists are that education program

thad

What helped us and our users the most

[shadie]

We (dds, a dutch isp) had a spam problem, and being a free email provider for such a long time did contribute to that. When we went out to solve this problem we did it in three steps:

- Implement RBL+ on our mailservers (got the load down a bit though)

- Created a global "spam filter" (weight system a la junkfilter) wich was opt-in for our users..

- We installed procmail, gave each user it's own .procmailrc and made a web interface to create procmail recipes in an "outlook" style.

This recipe maker could then be accessed by each user on their own user pages, or they could just make receipts through their shell access

Our end users didn't really notice much about our use of RBL. And most of them don't know what rbl is annyway.

But giving them the possibility of filtering email on the serverside _themseve_ did make a difference! It gave them a feeling we are fighting spam, and that THEY are also in control !

And last but not least... Giving your users info on how to _avoid_ spam is important!. We did this by writing clear faqs on avoiding spam, and pointing each new user to these faqs

(b.t.w... this was my first post on /. , lurking time is over i guess :-)