You could already have got that information from the OpenGroup web site. This has always been a useful companion to the Linux manpages when for example one needs to be exactly sure about when a particular error will occur.
But what if one of the people you correspond with was put onto the list?
I know there is a certain cultish Spews view that somebody's IP address is the single most important factor in whether they're worth talking with, but I don't think most people feel like that. I certainly don't.
Your idea of decent and helpful is wilfully screwing up a free service, wasting several days of volunteer time, and refusing to answer a straight question?
You seem to think I was talking about nanae, but it applies equally to the Spews operators.
The people that erroneously listed the Samba mailserver (SPEWS, or perhaps Osirusoft, I'm not sure) are completely different from the people who responded to Martin in the aforementioned nanae thread.
How can you know that, when Spews are anonymous? They could be exactly the same people, as far as you know.
but you'll cheerfully go on badmouthing SPEWS to anyone who'll listen
My personal opinion is that many people in nanae (the nominated public contact for Spews) are pricks, and Spews certainly act like pricks. But I support their right to be pricks, and to list whoever they want. I disagree with all the people here who're complaining about Spews being unaccountable, vengeful, irrational, etc. That may well all be true, but it's beside the point. Spews are just expressing their opinion, childish though it may be.
All I tell people is this: If you want to block non-spam personal email directed to you, use Spews. If you feel boycotting ISPs that Spews dislikes is more important than getting mail from friends and colleagues, use Spews. If you don't, don't. Do you disagree?
Most spam filters and RBLs try to have high spam rejection and a low false positive rate, where false positive is defined as rejecting mail that the user would normally want to read. People tend to assume that all anti-spam systems work this way. Spews explicitly does not: just the opposite, for them rejecting non-spam email is a positive good. This is such a surprising policy, and so dangerous to people who don't understand it, that it deserves to be publicizied.
By the way, in that previous thread I see you were happy enough to make the standard nanae assumption that anyone who disagrees with spews is a spammer. Yeah, samba.org, that famous spamhouse.
Google seems to have broken the thread; it just goes downhill from there.
I may not get mail from you, but that's your problem, not mine.
This seems to be a pretty common opinion among Spews supporters. I can respect your opinion but I find it a bit strange. Do you really get no value from email you receive? Why do you bother reading it at all?
Oh, I can quite appreciate that they're amusing surrealist ass-clowns. But they're still ass-clowns. The other thread you linked (not mine btw) is quite right: to nanae, it's all a big game.
quite decent and helpful
Your idea of decent and helpful is wilfully screwing up a free service, wasting several days of volunteer time, and refusing to answer a straight question? I must remember never to ask you for help.
I don't give a fuck about who Spews choose to list or not, and I certainly won't be wasting any more time trying to persuade them to change it. If you want to block my mail, be my guest. I just wish there was some way to volunteer to be on it.
Don't be silly. I understand that they don't directly block it, but in effect by publishing a recommendation that is obeyed by automatic systems, they do cause it to be blocked.
- you ought to know which ISPs are good and which are bad
- we're not going to tell you
- but if guess different to us, we are going to recommend your mail be blocked
Very helpful.
If they were genuinely concerned to organize a boycott of misbehaving ISPs, they would publish that information in a way that people could see it *before* they chose a host.
We are fully in agreement that the ISP *must* inform the customer that blocklisting/filtering is taking place. If your problems with blocklisting are resolved by the customer being fully informed, we have nothing to argue about.
I for one agree with this position.
At least in 2002-3, a significant number of sysadmins were using Spews to block mail but either did not understand the consequences, or did not communicate them to their users. This is bad, though it is not directly Spews's fault.
Hopefully articles like this one will help people make a better-informed decision about whether to use Spews or not.
Uh, if the ISP were doing their damndest to stop spam, they wouldn't be listed in SPEWS. SPEWS only lists after an ISP ignores repeated abuse on their network.
Uh, no, that's not exactly true. There are several examples of SPEWS (links elsewhere) of spews either listing people by mistake, or failing to remove blocks when they should have.
No, that would not necessarily work. Spews loons would see that as an attempt to evade their blocks, and they might well list the smarthost's ISP as well.
Or scream and bitch to your ISP
Or tell people, "if you want to see mail from me, don't use Spews". Works for me!
The purpose of listing entire netblocks is to defeat pink contracts
No, that's not true. It is the stated policy of Spews to block non-spamming senders as a way to exert indirect pressure on their ISPs.
The thing that annoys me is that many people have the same misapprehension as you: that Spews is just trying to block spam, as most of the other RBLs do.
It's not hard to do either, but there are costs associated with each one.
That's true. Of course it's even easier just to say "please don't use Spews". Most people I talk to, when they realize that Spews intentionally blocks legitimate mail, immediately stop using it.
A week before the fix isn't really that bad - though it probably would have been much quicker if a post clearly specifying the mistake had been made to news.admin.net-abuse.email as soon as the error became apparent.
On the contrary, most of the nanae vigilantes took great pleasure in seeing it. I had the distinct impression that the more people asked for it to be removed, the more it encouraged them to keep it, regardless of the original reason.
I suppose you're right that some large fraction of the people who complain there are spammers, or at least people who happen to be standing next to spammers. But taking gleeful delight from hearing of non-spam email being blocked just seems wrong to me.
the downstream users who lost a week's worth of email might feel differently.
By "downstream" I meant people whose mail was filtered by consulting the Spews list. They didn't lose all their mail of course, just the fraction from the blocked host. And of course those people don't get any notification, until they grill their sysadmins on why legitimate mail is being rejected. Some of that mail was important to the spews-filtered recipients -- more important than the little power trip of the nanae trolls.
Switch ISPs is a very easy thing to do, moving out of your home country is very difficult or impossible.
Speak for yourself. I work with systems with many dozens of colocated machines. Switching ISPs would require physically moving or replacing them, transitioning services, and so on. Hours or days of downtime, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, weeks of work for several admins.
Moving countries is a matter of buying a ticket and calling a mover. It would be far easier for me to move countries than for some of those services to move ISPs.
I think s/he understands it. The problem is that many of the people using Spews don't understand this. When it's explained, most of them give up on it.
Just so long as all the users whose mail you control understand and agree with that policy, it's fine with me.
If, on the other hand, you have customers who might want to see their mail more than they care about punishing Verizon... then it's deeply unprofessional, to say the least, to block their mail in favor of your own campaign.
apparently you have a better solution that will work just as well (if not more effectively) and without any so-called "collateral damage". Let's hear it.
I can think of a few.
1. Call Verizon, get as far up the chain as you can, and then hassle the droid about how irresponsible it is.
2. Encourage people to boycott Verizon.
3. Put up a web site listing spammers on Verizon's network.
4. Hassle cable companies to sue Verizon.
5. Get your local attorney to crack down on their spamming.
6. Forward all spam to the Verizon CEO.
Any of these might well work better than a tiny fraction of Verizon customer email being blocked. I doubt if many customers will actually complain to them or move.
SPEWS are absolutely consistent with their listing criteria, and always have been. If you're not a spammer and you've been included in a netblock listed by SPEWS in Level 1, it is always after your ISP has been repeatedly warned and they've done nothing about the problem spammer.
On the contrary, I have seen Spews list machines essentially by mistake. They apparently listed a typographic transposition of the netblock they really wanted to list. The block stayed in place for about a week before it was retracted, without any apology or real explanation.
Spews's stated position is that listing non-spamming hosts is absolutely OK, so in a sense they're absolutely consistent. But the downstream users who lost a week's worth of email might feel differently.
I agree with you about it being good that there are so many RBLs. For some purposes I might use Spews. But 95% of people using it for blocking have no idea of the consequences.
They can list the whole world, as far as I care. The only thing that pisses me off is the large number of postmasters who think spews is about blocking spam, rather than about hurting people spews dislike.
Which is why anyone contemplating a hosting contract should check every ISP's record on spam - and make it a provision in the contract that the ISP has to pay relocation expenses in the event of their inaction resulting in them being listed on a DNSBL.
Spews listed samba.org's ISP, and their supporters spewed the same sophistry: that the (non-profit) Samba admins should spend large amounts of time and money switching ISPs and physical hosts. The ISP's record was previously clean, and negotiating those kind of terms is impractical when hosting a small number of machines.
Spews openly admits that they see collateral damage as a positive good. The more non-spamming machines they hit, the happier they are. That's fine, they're happy to list whoever they want.
I just wish more administrators were aware that blocking using Spews is a definite decision to drop legitimate and wanted email. You *will* drop legitimate email, and possibly large quantities of it, if you use Spews. If hurting spammers is more important than getting your own mail, use it!
To judge from the number of complaints we got about people not getting their mailing lists, I don't think many of the admins using Spews were aware of the consequences. Basically everybody we spoke to decided to use less-insane RBLs.
Using a mix of sane RBLs blended through SpamAssassin is probably the way to go these days.
Slashdot Mirror
You should read the book, it's really good!
(Ha ha -- all the top google hits for it are cheat sheets for people writing school essays.)
How do you measure goodness in a flagelator?
More or less by the amount of pain they inflict, multiplied by the style and panache with which they do it.
"I don't like flagelation, but I can admire a good flagelator" -- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
You could already have got that information from the OpenGroup web site. This has always been a useful companion to the Linux manpages when for example one needs to be exactly sure about when a particular error will occur.
But what if one of the people you correspond with was put onto the list?
I know there is a certain cultish Spews view that somebody's IP address is the single most important factor in whether they're worth talking with, but I don't think most people feel like that. I certainly don't.
Your idea of decent and helpful is wilfully screwing up a free service, wasting several days of volunteer time, and refusing to answer a straight question?
You seem to think I was talking about nanae, but it applies equally to the Spews operators.
The people that erroneously listed the Samba mailserver (SPEWS, or perhaps Osirusoft, I'm not sure) are completely different from the people who responded to Martin in the aforementioned nanae thread.
How can you know that, when Spews are anonymous? They could be exactly the same people, as far as you know.
but you'll cheerfully go on badmouthing SPEWS to anyone who'll listen
My personal opinion is that many people in nanae (the nominated public contact for Spews) are pricks, and Spews certainly act like pricks. But I support their right to be pricks, and to list whoever they want. I disagree with all the people here who're complaining about Spews being unaccountable, vengeful, irrational, etc. That may well all be true, but it's beside the point. Spews are just expressing their opinion, childish though it may be.
All I tell people is this: If you want to block non-spam personal email directed to you, use Spews. If you feel boycotting ISPs that Spews dislikes is more important than getting mail from friends and colleagues, use Spews. If you don't, don't. Do you disagree?
Most spam filters and RBLs try to have high spam rejection and a low false positive rate, where false positive is defined as rejecting mail that the user would normally want to read. People tend to assume that all anti-spam systems work this way. Spews explicitly does not: just the opposite, for them rejecting non-spam email is a positive good. This is such a surprising policy, and so dangerous to people who don't understand it, that it deserves to be publicizied.
By the way, in that previous thread I see you were happy enough to make the standard nanae assumption that anyone who disagrees with spews is a spammer. Yeah, samba.org, that famous spamhouse.
Google seems to have broken the thread; it just goes downhill from there.
I may not get mail from you, but that's your problem, not mine.
This seems to be a pretty common opinion among Spews supporters. I can respect your opinion but I find it a bit strange. Do you really get no value from email you receive? Why do you bother reading it at all?
Turn your sense of humour back on.
Oh, I can quite appreciate that they're amusing surrealist ass-clowns. But they're still ass-clowns. The other thread you linked (not mine btw) is quite right: to nanae, it's all a big game.
quite decent and helpful
Your idea of decent and helpful is wilfully screwing up a free service, wasting several days of volunteer time, and refusing to answer a straight question? I must remember never to ask you for help.
I don't give a fuck about who Spews choose to list or not, and I certainly won't be wasting any more time trying to persuade them to change it. If you want to block my mail, be my guest. I just wish there was some way to volunteer to be on it.
SPEWS does not block jack squat.
Don't be silly. I understand that they don't directly block it, but in effect by publishing a recommendation that is obeyed by automatic systems, they do cause it to be blocked.
See, for example this thread where they say
- you ought to know which ISPs are good and which are bad
- we're not going to tell you
- but if guess different to us, we are going to recommend your mail be blocked
Very helpful.
If they were genuinely concerned to organize a boycott of misbehaving ISPs, they would publish that information in a way that people could see it *before* they chose a host.
Here's another selection of clowns in action.
Or another, saying that bombing the Pentagon would be a reasonable response to spam. Lovely.
We are fully in agreement that the ISP *must* inform the customer that blocklisting/filtering is taking place. If your problems with blocklisting are resolved by the customer being fully informed, we have nothing to argue about.
I for one agree with this position.
At least in 2002-3, a significant number of sysadmins were using Spews to block mail but either did not understand the consequences, or did not communicate them to their users. This is bad, though it is not directly Spews's fault.
Hopefully articles like this one will help people make a better-informed decision about whether to use Spews or not.
You said "SPEWS only blocks"; the presence of long-lasting errors proves that is not universally true.
Uh, if the ISP were doing their damndest to stop spam, they wouldn't be listed in SPEWS. SPEWS only lists after an ISP ignores repeated abuse on their network.
Uh, no, that's not exactly true. There are several examples of SPEWS (links elsewhere) of spews either listing people by mistake, or failing to remove blocks when they should have.
Or smarthost your mail.
No, that would not necessarily work. Spews loons would see that as an attempt to evade their blocks, and they might well list the smarthost's ISP as well.
Or scream and bitch to your ISP
Or tell people, "if you want to see mail from me, don't use Spews". Works for me!
The purpose of listing entire netblocks is to defeat pink contracts
No, that's not true. It is the stated policy of Spews to block non-spamming senders as a way to exert indirect pressure on their ISPs.
The thing that annoys me is that many people have the same misapprehension as you: that Spews is just trying to block spam, as most of the other RBLs do.
It's not hard to do either, but there are costs associated with each one.
That's true. Of course it's even easier just to say "please don't use Spews". Most people I talk to, when they realize that Spews intentionally blocks legitimate mail, immediately stop using it.
A week before the fix isn't really that bad - though it probably would have been much quicker if a post clearly specifying the mistake had been made to news.admin.net-abuse.email as soon as the error became apparent.
On the contrary, most of the nanae vigilantes took great pleasure in seeing it. I had the distinct impression that the more people asked for it to be removed, the more it encouraged them to keep it, regardless of the original reason.
I suppose you're right that some large fraction of the people who complain there are spammers, or at least people who happen to be standing next to spammers. But taking gleeful delight from hearing of non-spam email being blocked just seems wrong to me.
the downstream users who lost a week's worth of email might feel differently.
By "downstream" I meant people whose mail was filtered by consulting the Spews list. They didn't lose all their mail of course, just the fraction from the blocked host. And of course those people don't get any notification, until they grill their sysadmins on why legitimate mail is being rejected. Some of that mail was important to the spews-filtered recipients -- more important than the little power trip of the nanae trolls.
Switch ISPs is a very easy thing to do, moving out of your home country is very difficult or impossible.
Speak for yourself. I work with systems with many dozens of colocated machines. Switching ISPs would require physically moving or replacing them, transitioning services, and so on. Hours or days of downtime, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, weeks of work for several admins.
Moving countries is a matter of buying a ticket and calling a mover. It would be far easier for me to move countries than for some of those services to move ISPs.
Indeed, there are much better solutions from organizations that *are* a bunch of amateurs.
Whether you get paid or not doesn't matter. It is Spews's at-any-cost jihad that's the problem.
Wow, that is the single best description of Spews ever. I'd buy you a beer, if you were in the same place and liked beer.
I think s/he understands it. The problem is that many of the people using Spews don't understand this. When it's explained, most of them give up on it.
OK, so you want to block Verizon. Good for you.
Just so long as all the users whose mail you control understand and agree with that policy, it's fine with me.
If, on the other hand, you have customers who might want to see their mail more than they care about punishing Verizon... then it's deeply unprofessional, to say the least, to block their mail in favor of your own campaign.
apparently you have a better solution that will work just as well (if not more effectively) and without any so-called "collateral damage". Let's hear it.
I can think of a few.
1. Call Verizon, get as far up the chain as you can, and then hassle the droid about how irresponsible it is.
2. Encourage people to boycott Verizon.
3. Put up a web site listing spammers on Verizon's network.
4. Hassle cable companies to sue Verizon.
5. Get your local attorney to crack down on their spamming.
6. Forward all spam to the Verizon CEO.
Any of these might well work better than a tiny fraction of Verizon customer email being blocked. I doubt if many customers will actually complain to them or move.
SPEWS are absolutely consistent with their listing criteria, and always have been. If you're not a spammer and you've been included in a netblock listed by SPEWS in Level 1, it is always after your ISP has been repeatedly warned and they've done nothing about the problem spammer.
On the contrary, I have seen Spews list machines essentially by mistake. They apparently listed a typographic transposition of the netblock they really wanted to list. The block stayed in place for about a week before it was retracted, without any apology or real explanation.
Spews's stated position is that listing non-spamming hosts is absolutely OK, so in a sense they're absolutely consistent. But the downstream users who lost a week's worth of email might feel differently.
I agree with you about it being good that there are so many RBLs. For some purposes I might use Spews. But 95% of people using it for blocking have no idea of the consequences.
s/happy to list/welcome to list/
They can list the whole world, as far as I care. The only thing that pisses me off is the large number of postmasters who think spews is about blocking spam, rather than about hurting people spews dislike.
Which is why anyone contemplating a hosting contract should check every ISP's record on spam - and make it a provision in the contract that the ISP has to pay relocation expenses in the event of their inaction resulting in them being listed on a DNSBL.
Spews listed samba.org's ISP, and their supporters spewed the same sophistry: that the (non-profit) Samba admins should spend large amounts of time and money switching ISPs and physical hosts. The ISP's record was previously clean, and negotiating those kind of terms is impractical when hosting a small number of machines.
Spews openly admits that they see collateral damage as a positive good. The more non-spamming machines they hit, the happier they are. That's fine, they're happy to list whoever they want.
I just wish more administrators were aware that blocking using Spews is a definite decision to drop legitimate and wanted email. You *will* drop legitimate email, and possibly large quantities of it, if you use Spews. If hurting spammers is more important than getting your own mail, use it!
To judge from the number of complaints we got about people not getting their mailing lists, I don't think many of the admins using Spews were aware of the consequences. Basically everybody we spoke to decided to use less-insane RBLs.
Using a mix of sane RBLs blended through SpamAssassin is probably the way to go these days.