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

Re:RBLs are a failure

[Phil Karn]

I absolutely agree. My past run-ins with the MAPS people have been extremely unpleasant. "Militant" is exactly the right word. "Self righteous jerks" would also apply.

A while ago, when the MAPS DUL virus first began to spread, my dad began to have problems delivering his mail from his Linux system on a cable modem. So I contacted MAPS and told them about what I naively assumed they would agree was unintentional collateral damage. Not only did they refuse to take his IP address off the list, they were spiteful enough to contact my dad's ISP and register a complaint about his "unauthorized" server!

It goes without saying that my dad is not a spammer. And we both see to it that his system is properly maintained and configured. All we ever wanted was to exchange email email without depending on his ISP's slow and unreliable mail servers.

MAPS and other spam vigilantes are actually far worse than the spammers they claim to be fighting. No spammer has never prevented me from sending or receiving wanted email. MAPS often does so, and they have to go away. Since they're unlikely to do so on their own accord, our only alternative is to educate the ISPs to not use their services. Openly boycot any ISP who subscribes to the MAPS, and tell them we simply don't want their "help" in blocking email. Patronize the more enlightened ISPs that give you a choice as to how or whether your mail will be spam-filtered.

Re:Not anymore

[allgood2]

I agree, my first real negative experience with them, was when I was attempting to be proactive. I was setting up an email server and wanted to find out what holes came in the base configuration. I feed it an IP plugged the in-progress server to get back a report, and found my IP address automatically blocked. This address belonged to an active server that was already properly configured but the client didn't have any extra IPs for me to use. There server was down the entire weekend, plus three workdays, before I could get them to remove the ban. Yet, they encourage techs to test a machine and receive a report of security holes. After that, I pretty much put out the word to never use their service to test a machine that's being built.

I hate spam, but their methods pretty much demand a new approach to fighting spam, creating blacklist, and even just testing servers. Their support is horrible and while it guarantees it will hurt a spammer here or there, that's pretty much like shooting in a crowd then stating well at least I killed a bad guy.