Why Blacklisting Spammers Is A Bad Idea

Roland Piquepaille writes "For the last two months, an eternity in Internet time, I was unable to reach -- and to contribute to -- Smart Mobs, the collective blogging effort around the next social revolution initiated by Howard Rheingold. Why that? Because an unknown customer of Verio decided it was a spamming site and asked the company to blacklist the site. Verio complied -- probably without even checking it -- and my problems started. It took me dozens of e-mails and phone calls and two visits to the headquarters of my french ISP, Noos, to fix the situation. More about this horror story is available here."

Comments

Horror story my arse

[pauldy]

Use some common sense editors when presented with a story that seems unusually slanted please take it at face value. This is why corporations such as verio need to be made aware of their policies not working not that black lists do not. Blacklists are the only thing that works against spammers and they know it. So how do they fight back by using the blacklists against regular sites to try and disrupt users service so that people might think twice about using them.

Instead this article should be title "Why Blacklist Do Work" and what spammers are doing to try and disrupt them.

Had the same problem..

[Chicane-UK]

Someone anonymously submitted our MS Exchange server (I don't blame em *grin*) as a spam relay, despite the fact that it is not. As said in the original post, they didn't even check the server they just blacklisted it.

The first thing we know about it is when members of staff come to us and complain that they are getting error messages such as 'denied' when trying to email important people.

Sigh.. in fact I have that very same problem waiting to be tackled when I get back on Monday morning. And its always such a ballache to get your mail servers removed from these block lists... :(

Re:Had the same problem..

[sirket]

I know of no blacklist that does not first verify that you are indeed an open relay. If you know which service did this, then please let the rest of us know so that we can be sure not to use them.

-sirket

Re:Improperly done blacklist

[PReDiToR]

I'm still pissed that AOL won't let me send email to any of their customers, just because I run my own SMTP server.

That sucks ass royally.

Hypocrisy

[sirket]

First of all, the idea of Verio blocking spammers is laughable. They have always been a haven for spammers and everyone here probably already knows that.

The real issue, however, seems to be this guys ISP. I mean honestly, what the hell is wrong with them? If I had called Speakeasy with this sort of problem, it would have been taken care of that day.

-sirket

Re:Yup, I was RBL'd

[sirket]

First off, mail-abuse.org is notorious for their response times.

That said, you left a relay open for 3 days, and potentially tens of thousands of spam emails, and you are going to sit their and complain that it took two weeks for you to be removed from the black list? What about all the individual admins that added you to their personal blacklists and just never bothered removing you?

-sirket

Re:Improperly done blacklist

[bigberk]

If so, why don't you use your ISP's server as smarthost and relay through them?

Why don't I use my ISP's mail server? Because:

1. My ISP's mail server sometimes takes as much as 3 hours to deliver a single email
2. Mail sometimes gets lost entirely, and without access to logs I have no clue what happened
3. I have a host with TCP/IP abilities just like everyone else. Just because I'm not paying thousands of dollars doesn't mean I can't establish a port 25 connection to another host. I resent the drive by industry to segregate connectivity based on service class (consumer/business). TCP/IP knows no such labels.