Slashdot Mirror
Giving Your Greytrapping a Helping Hand
Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Some spam houses have invested in real mail servers now, meaning that they are able to get past greylisting and even content filtering. Recently Peter Hansteen found himself resorting to active greytrapping to put some spammers in their place. The article also contains a list of spam houses' snail mail addresses in case you want to tour their sites."
Okay. Fair enough. There are exceptions.
I'm bitter because the now defunct SWEWs were overzealous assholes who cast a giant net. Our tiny /26 got caught when our upstreams /16 got blocked for whatever reason. We only had a couple clients get their shit rejected--and in those cases our client knew the recipients personally, I just had them call the recipient to inform them they had an idiot running their mail server.
The people using things like SPEWs to block mail traffic were not thinking like you are. They are either hoping for a quick fix or are on some kind of vigilante mission. The former can be educated by letting them know how much legit shit they've blocked. The latter are hopeless and as I said a few times, it is easier to let the higher-ups know what the deal is.
If you've got the stats to back it up, that is a whole different ball of wax. If I was in your list, I probably has doing some serious shit. I do the same thing only with comment spammers that have IPs of open proxies. As long as you have the metrics to back things up in the off-chance you do block a little legit traffic, life is cool. But you gotta have the metrics, which means you gotta thing. People who use spite-lists aren't thinking, and that is the problem.