Slashdot Mirror
Spam Blacklist Targets Hijacked Telewest Customers
davidmcg writes "BBC.co.uk reports that UK cable firm Telewest has had almost one million email address blacklisted by an anti-spam firm. The Spam Prevention Early Warning System blacklisted the email addresses because a large number of the machines using them have been hijacked by spammers. Telewest have stated that they knew about the problem and have been working with customers to regain control of their machines."
It's a useless service that is in no way forthcoming about its purpose, and has no accountability.
The admins who run it are jumped up petty control freaks who think the internet should be run according to their whims, and they seem totally unable to decide whether it's there to stop spam, or punish spam hosters.
When challenged, they make all sorts of excuses and justifications without any ability to back their aguments up. They have made no impact on spam at all, and their service reduces the functionality of the internet more than SPAM does.
The SPEWS list is worthless as anything other than an indicator of potential spam. Any admin who takes blocks all of SPEWS doesn't deserve his job.
They are randomly blocking whole netblocks without having any clue about what is really going on. That way they blacklisted whole countries like China, Hong Kong, etc.. While it is arguable if a random geek in the US needs to receive mails from China, any bigger corporation with any contacts to foreign companies does.
In short, spews is USELESS for any serious business, and any admin that is using that blacklist for tagging should other BL lists (e.g. Spamcop.net)... any admin in a bigger company using that BL for killing mails should go to look for a new job, because he is obviously highly incompetent.
We had many cases where we were unable to deliver our mails because some moron admin in a big international company with worldwide suppliers and customers was using spews for rejecting mails.
btw. I am currently export manager for a manufacturer in china, and have to deal with such shit everyday. We host the servers by our self, because the ISPs here are incompetent. There are no other alternatives though, so we have to live with that. Pressuring the has NO effect. We still have after six months, three different isps, pressuring and detailed step-by-step instructions no r-DNS.
Companies like SPEWS blocking whole countries upset me because of their pure ignorance.
If you need a good BL, use Spamcop.net, kills nearly almost all spam here, the rest is done by spamassassin.