Ask Slashdot: Should I Publish My Collection of Email Spamming IP Addresses?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 1, 2015 @03:25AM from the for-all-the-good-it'll-do-ya dept.

An anonymous reader writes: I have, for a while now, been collecting IP addresses from which email spam has been sent to, or attempted to be relayed through, my email server. I was wondering if I should publish them, so that others can adopt whatever steps are necessary to protect their email servers from that vermin. However, I am facing ethical issues here. What if the addresses are simply spoofed, and therefore branding them as spamming addresses might cause harm to innocent parties? What if, after having been co-opted by spammers, they are now used legitimately? I wonder if there's a market for all the thousands of webmail addresses that send Slashdot nothing but spam.

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No by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-01 03:27 · Score: 2, Informative

I think you answered your own question. The only situation might be to share it privately with others, but publicly, no!
Re:Go talk to Spamhaus by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-01 04:10 · Score: 2, Informative

tens of thousands of domains
Nobody blacklists "domains", every spam comes from a fake email address. No, they blacklist IP blocks.

it didn't even have any email accounts set up.
And? If you didn't block outbound SMTP it's trivial to write an SMTP client in just about any language. PHP even has mail functions built in to send mail. It's trivial to write up a PHP script that you upload a CSV file to and have it email everyone on it without an "email account".