Should You Trust MAPS?

patrick42 asks: "Recently, my co-location facility was hit by a massive blacklist by an over-zealous 'investigator' at MAPS. 180,210 IP addresses in total are included in the blacklist -- and all because of a few spam complaints that weren't dealt with quickly enough. To make matters worse, they put this in effect either late Friday night, or early Saturday morning -- hours during which MAPS is not available for contact! (Mon-Fri, 9-5 only) How do people deal with MAPS and other RBL services who will not cooperate or be reasonable? And on a broader front, are you really prepared to trust a company like Kelkea, Inc. (owners of MAPS) to decide what emails gets to you without really knowing how they operate and deal with resolution processes?"

"I spent all weekend long trying to get a hold of the people at MAPS, as they don't bother telling you when they are open. When I finally got a hold of someone on Monday morning (not an easy task, mind you!), they told me that they are not open on the weekend, so it would have been *impossible* to resolve this issue quickly. And because I was only a customer of the company who owns these IPs, they would not unblock my subset of IPs. Despite the problem originating from a handful of IP addresses, MAPS saw it appropriate to block over 180,000 IP addresses just before the weekend! I had already made several phone calls and emails to my co-location facility, and they told me they were doing their best to get a hold of someone there. Several emails had been sent, and just as I first experienced, they could not reach anyone at MAPS by phone. When I finally talked to someone at MAPS, he told me that he would not be proactive in the matter by actually phoning my co-locator to work this out.

These people at MAPS thinks themselves quite high and holy, and in some ways they are: many ISPs and the like will bounce emails just because MAPS tells them to. (I've since removed MAPS from my list of RBL servers to check.) As a small-business owner, MAPS can be very hurtful to a business and very uncooperative in helping resolve the issue. I gave them a couple subnets of mine to unblock, but they would not, even though my IPs were not involved in the original complaint.

This experience has certainly made me think twice about who I trust to decide the fate of my incoming email."

Comments

MAPS is better than SPAM

[Omega]

I'd take overzealous MAPS investigator over being deluged with SPAM any day. You said it yourself:

and all because of a few spam complaints that weren't dealt with quickly enough

So you admit, that you were relaying SPAM -- which hurts everyone on the internet. And yet you're upset because you were inconvienced by servers which check MAPS refusing to accept your mail for a couple of days.

I think MAPS should go further and recommend a 1 week penalty (after fix, of course) for all servers which relay SPAM -- just to make sure they're really fixed.

Because we all know...

[NitroWolf]

Because we all know that black hole services work!

Oh wait... no they don't.

Anyone who uses a blackhole service as the final decision maker on whether or not to reject mail is a worthless system administrator that is negligent in his or her job. They should not be allowed to administrate systems if that is the case.

The bottom line is, Black hole systems like MAPS/ORBS/etc... don't work as intended, period. Anyone who says differently lives with blinders on, and is totally incapable of accepting reality. Yes, I feel quite comfortable making this blanket statement.

I, thankfully, have never been on the receiving end of this vigalante, worthless system, and my mail servers rarely get rejected for main being misidentified as spam. However, I sympathize greatly with the people that do. Since I am a competent administrator, I am capable of seeing exactly why RBL's don't work; why they have never worked, and why they will never work. Anyone with any competence whatsoever in managing a real, live mail system on the real, live internet (running a mail server from your DSL line does not count) knows exactly why RBLs are useless as final arbitrators.

They can be used just fine in a weighted system, and that's exactly how they should be used... but any system that uses it for final arbitration should be wiped off the face of the internet until such time as the system administrators can get their heads out of thier collective asses and learn how to actually do their job, instead of shucking off their responsibility to these RBL administrators that have a God complex and should be shot on site. They are little better than the spammers they are trying to stop in their zealotry (is that a word?).

Re:A sword that cuts both ways

[Hawke666]

They didn't punish the whole US. They punished the occupants of the WTC towers.

Re:A sword that cuts both ways

[iCEBaLM]

Cruel, unnecessarily harmful? We're talking about fucking email you retard, not genocide. You have a choice to use RBLs or not, excercise that choice if you don't agree with the methods. I happen to agree that the ends justify the means.

Re:A sword that cuts both ways

[tftp]

Watching CNN is not supposed to make evil deeds suddenly good. But apparently it does, in minds of people who are very far from the scene.

How we deal with these companies

[Errtu76]

Not. If users complain to me saying their email bounced because on of our IP's is blacklisted by then i tell them exactly this: "Complain with the provider that's hosting the email server and makes use of this list.". Seriously. Contacting some obscure company that's probably run by a geek in his mom's basement is definately not worth the time.

These companies think they're helping the internet, but in fact they're making it worse. Why on earth would any sysadmin make use of a list to block emails, when this list is not even being maintained by him/her???

My opinion: if you have to depend on somebody else to compile a blacklist for you, you are lazy and shouldn't be running a mailserver in the first place.

Ugh, RBLs

[The Spoonman]

Worst idea ever. A few admin jobs ago, my company's IPs ended up on one of them (was it ORBS? I wanna say it was). I don't think it's still around, but I later found out it was one of the more popular ones but it was run by some guy out of his parent's basement. Once you're on one, it's a very short time before you're on them all. But, I shouldn't have been on any as from the moment that mail server was connected to the Internet, I used SMTPAuth for mail sending. There was no way you could send mail without a username/password. I finally tracked down who'd put us on the list, and there was no way to contact them (again, some guy in his parent's basement), so you had to use their automated utility to get off their lists. Everytime I ran it, the thing would tell me "SMTPAuth required, not a spammer". But, my IP wouldn't be removed. Instead, and this was the best part, it would list it as ANOTHER confirmation that we were spammers. It took over a month to get off this stupid list, be thankful it only took you a few days.

RBLs are the most useless, stupid, assinine idea ever to gain wide acceptance. All of the evidence proves that. Spam continues and continues to rise every day, despite all of the "hard work" put in by RBL groups. Fuck you idiots, you're not making anything better, you're only making life worse. Every mail admin I've met has had some kind of anecdote about an RBL fucking up and wrongly putting them on a list, it's time to stop using them and find a REAL solution to spam.