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Paul Graham Describes Dangers of Spam Blacklists
CRoby writes "Paul Graham posted an essay describing the danger and corruption of the main spammer blacklists today. It discusses MAPS and the SBL, the blacklist created to try to alleviate the abuses of MAPS, and suggests (maybe) another blacklist's creation."
We've been blacklisted before and the sysadmins who run these things often WILL NOT remove you, no matter what. I'd take all the SPAM anyday vs. not being able to send legitimate emails.
I assume that what Paul Graham is complaining about must be SpamAssassin, or some other content filter, applying a score to articles containing URLs, which when looked up in DNS resolve to listed IP addresses. This is much less acceptable, since the sender has no way to know that their e-mail may have been classified as spam.
The details of the listing can be found at http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL279 45.
This is a /32 - i.e. a single IP address. I don't know
why Paul Graham's web site (which has that IP address) has been associated
with textileshop.com, which has a completely different IP address.
The other Yahoo listing on the SBL is also a /32.
I also note in another of Paul Graham's articles http://paulgraham.com/sblbad.html he claims
As any fule kno, the most notorious spam blacklist is SPEWS. ~...his website is hosted on the same IP address as a spammer (textileshop.com) was on yesterday, and because of that he's seeing some of his mail blocked.
There's certainly a need for thoughtful and hopefully positive criticism of blacklist behaviour. This article is not it.
Is it possible that it's his outgoing cable-modem IP address that is the problem?
Is it, as the parent suggests, spam-assasin filtering?
I'm more than happy to get on the wagon of unresponsive RBLs. The only way they can actually get the response they want is if cleaning up your act results in de-listing.
However, Mr. Graham makes some big claims with nothing to back it up--and attempting to investigate on your own shows that his claims don't seem to check out.
Here is the link, that responsible editors would've offered in a story like this...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Maybe you only have three choices of broadband ISP at home, or live somewhere sufficiently rural that there are only three choices of dial ISP - that's entirely irrelevant to how many choices you have on where you get your email, send your email, or host your web servers. Sure, it's convenient to be able to run all those things from your home Linux box, but if you want to do that, you'll probably find that your cable modem company and some of the DSL ISPs that your phone company supports might not permit that. There are hundreds or thousands of companies that run POP/IMAP mailbox services, and probably more that will host web sites, and that's not even getting into options like virtual hosting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For example, in many places it's legal to do a citizen's arrest if you see someone actually committing a crime. If someone suspects a crime will be commited and hangs around armed with the intent of bringing the person in, that's vigilantism, and perfectly legal. Or even hanging around waiting to call the cops.
Or if, for example, people keep getting attacked in a certain part of town, so you, who happen to have a blackbelt, wander through there, waiting to be attacked so you can fight back...
It's usually not called vigilantism if it's legal, but if you are attempting to do the work of the legal system, it is being a vigilante.
However, vigilantism requires enforcing a law, be it an actual law or just a made up one. Or punishing someone who already broke the law. (Or, as sometimes happens, you merely suspect broke the law.)
Whereas spam fighting may be interacting with the results of a crime, it's no more vigilantism than picking up litter is, or rebuilding a house torched by arson. The crime already happened, no one's trying to punish or catch the criminals, they're trying to undo the harm caused.
I guess you technically could call spam reporters 'civil vigilantes', by analogy, because they are reporting a contract violation between two third parties to one of those parties. Instead of taking criminal offenses into their own hands, they're taking civil ones. But that's getting a bit silly.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
That works fine for him to keep the mail coming in. The problem is when you combine the annoying "dynamic ip range" lists with an idiotic admin that thinks using one to blindly deny is a good idea. I mentioned in another post, but Juno and Netzero do this. Neither will pay attention to you when you complain. Of course they also RBL deny their postmaster account, which is a no-no.