Why Blacklisting Spammers Is A Bad Idea

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 9, 2003 @10:15AM 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."

1 of 396 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Improperly done blacklist by bigberk · 2003-11-09 12:38 · 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.