MAPS vs. Gordon Feyck: Who Owns the DUL?

etrnl writes "The spam-l mailing list has an interesting post from Nick Nicholas about a recent lawsuit between MAPS, LLC. and Gordon Fecyk, who had arranged with Paul Vixie to host the DUL with MAPS in 1998. Even more interesting is that Nick was the Executive Director of MAPS who hired Gordon at MAPS in 1999. Notable quote from Nick: 'I find it extremely ironic that an organization which is currently soliciting donations to its own legal defense fund would now be using its limited resources to pursue litigation against a former employee.'" MAPS wants a temporary restraining order on two separate copyright claims: first, that Feyck can't use the DUL database, and second, that he can't run a too-similar website (now down). The bone of contention is that Feyck claims he bought back the DUL from MAPS, and MAPS disagrees. Incidentally, the DUL is currently stopping CmdrTaco from directly emailing one of the Slash coders.

Comments

Re:Acronyms Abound

[MiTEG]

MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC) is a not-for-profit California organization whose mission is to defend the Internet's e-mail system from abuse by spammers. Their principal means of accomplishing this mission is by educating and encouraging ISP's to enforce strong terms and conditions prohibiting their customers from engaging in abusive e-mail practices.

DUL (Dial-up User List) is not a blacklist, though it is often mistaken for such. The DUL is a listing of dynamic ISPs that is used as a filter by subscriber ISPs to prevent direct e-mail from those addresses.

Interested in MAPS? Also Check out DCC...

[jwiegley]

I've used the MAPS tools in the past to check that my mail servers are properly configured to reject relays. But for actually stopping the 20-30 spam articles I get per day nothing has worked. (We all know what those dreaded "unsubscribe" "features" really do. don't we?)

That is nothing worked until a few days ago. I recommend anybody that has spam problems, can run procmail or is in charge of a mail server running sendmail check out the "Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse" (DCC) at http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/

It took me some time to get the dcc sendmail milter dccm working correctly but, since I did, this has become my new best friend. Its catching 100% of spam targeted at me and rejecting it.

From what I know about MAPS I think its a needed service to keep ISPs in check. But it seems targeted at attacking the delivers of spam and doesn't seem to provide much to directly protect the recipients of spam mail. DCC is the only solution I've found that accurately prevents spam mail from even being delivered to myself or users. I think this is necessary because if nobody actually receives spam the spammers will starve.

So If you're like me and think spam is a rashy plague that you can't get rid of their is a cream available and it is named DCC. Check it out.

Re:Acronyms Abound

[Jade E. 2]

The DUL is not a blacklist in the sense that all mail from the listed IPs is refused. The DUL is used to refuse direct mail from those IPs, but mail relayed through another server is allowed. This prevents someone on a dynamic IP from spamming by directly connecting to the SMTP server of each target address, instead of sending all the mail through an open relay. Legitimate customers simply need to use their ISP's (or a 3rd party) SMTP relay (which presumably has message speed limits on it) to send mail, and it will go through.

Yes, this prevents someone from running their own SMTP relay on a dynamic IP, but it's the only effective way of preventing such direct-to-target-server spam from going through.