Spanish Internet Provider's SMTP traffic Blocked

Andrew D Kirch writes "After being barraged by spam and 419 scams from Rima-TDE and telefonica.es [translated], the AHBL has announced that all of Spain's national ISP's e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service. One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?"

Comments

The future of blocking?

[Animats]

The near future of blocklists may include all of these highly spam-tolerant areas:

• China
• Romania
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• Florida

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[Daengbo]

Indeed, my living in Thailand blocks me from many things on the internet:

• Paypal is unusable;
• Many other online ordering service block my whole area;
• I have been unable to find a colo provider with php/mysql that will either accept my payment or allow FTP from SE Asia for their free account;
• Loxinfo (the largest ISP here, I believe) users cannot post to Slashdot stories.

Living in a country that is a home for spam relays, FTP assaults, whatever... makes life much more difficult online, though I do none of this.

Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist?

[jcam2]

Personally, I've found that many blacklists are getting rather over-zealous lately. For example, one of my ISP's mail servers is on the SpamCop and Dynablock lists, causing pretty much everything I (and many hundreds of thousands of other people) send out to be classified as spam!

Fortunately, I can work around this by relaying mail through a non-blacklisted server, but most subscribers won't have the ability or access to do that. And if the ISP ever turns off port 25, I may have no choice but to relay through their servers :-(