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Should You Trust MAPS?
"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."
How often does it need to be said? Spamhausen only react to complaints by their own customers, so complain to your provider (co-location facility). Loudly. And if they won't listen, let your wallet speak up and walk.
he's not giving the full story, "a bit of a spam issue". piss off he had 100000000 of spam comingout an unsecured ms exchange server or something, and maps rightly blocked him. i consider it fair punishment for poor administration.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
What the original poster was probably referring to is the tendancy of RBLs to misrepresent their accuracy, importance, and popularity to system administrators. Many of whom are too lazy or incompetent to use the lists as a 'greylist' or check that they don't cause more problems than they solve.
Every one of these RBLs should be advising admins not to block according to their rules. People have to remember that the people running these lists are effectively terrorists, using collateral damage as leverage to change the behaviour of organisations that they have no bargaining power with (ISPs).
When Al Qaeda flew 737s into the world trade towers, they didn't care whether any of the people involved were actively involved in harming muslims or the islamic faith, they were trying to influence the government, and bring attention to their cause by causing massive amounts of collateral damage to innocents.
More people should support and endorse any effort to have these blocklists removed from circulation and have the organizations shut down. I for one, would rather recieve spam if the alternative means not recieving emails or not being able to send them.
The ISPs that use these blocklists are not the same ones that are actually affected, most ISPs stop using them once they realise how difficult to get off these lists once they have been added.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's been blocked as part of a netblock by one of these lists and fought to be removed, but is still happy to use them.
Fine. You've decided you can make a case from the victim's perspective, what a subtle use of your lawyerly skills. Attempting to turn away from making a bad problem worse, what does your training (as a techie and a lawyer, natch) tell you is the right way around this problem? What if the ISP ignores all inquiries? How do you know your solution is right vs. wrong? It doesn't result in the least impact upon the greatest number of people if it allows the spammers to keep working while you get your precious tortious interference resolved. Basically, your solution seems a bit selfish and shortsighted.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
I don't remember if it was MAPS that I ended up on.. but the problem was that I opened up a web-based proxy server (or something, I dont remember, it was a while ago)... I didn't realize at the time that it could be used to forward mail. One of the RBLs picked up on this, and banned my server's IP. When I tried getting off the list, the web form to do this sends a confirmation email to postmaster@[the results of their reverse dns lookup], which ended up going to Rackshack, the server hosting company, rather than to me.
Ugh, was frustrating.
Also, my old company had a problem with one of these RBLs -- there was a spammer somewhere on our subnet or something at one point. We had such a hard time getting off the lists.
Ugh, was frustrating.