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Why Blacklisting Spammers Is A Bad Idea

Posted by timothy on from the painting-with-machine-gun dept.

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."

4 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Horror story my arse by pauldy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Improperly done blacklist by PReDiToR · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --

    Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
  3. Hypocrisy by sirket · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  4. Re:Improperly done blacklist by bigberk · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.