One customer becomes an involuntary helper of a spammer and all other customers are supposed to find external mail relays?
Not necessarally. One customer becomes an involuntary helper of a spammer, and the ISP should step in to mitigate the damage that customer causes. That's good network administration. That's common sense. That kind of action usually keeps ISPs off of blocklists.
And it's the ISPs fault that the customer didn't secure his system properly, so he must pay for all this?
If the ISP is either unwilling or unable to control their network and get rid of all the spammers or trojaned boxes, then yes, the ISP is 100% responsible. Why is this so difficult to understand?
Collateral damage is about as annoying as spam.
Collateral damage sucks. Don't get me wrong there. The problem here is that nobody seems to want to blame the right people. Everyone wants to blame the blocklists because they're a stationary target. Nobody wants to blame the spammers or the ISPs that support/ignore them. If ISPs were more proactive in eliminating spam from their networks, there would be no need for blocklists, ergo no collateral damage.
I'd even say that it is worse, because - unlike spam - there is very little you can do about it yourself, sometimes you don't even notice that you're blacklisted before important mail is lost.
There is no such thing as "very important mail". By design, e-mail is not reliable. Hell, by design the whole damn Internet is unreliable. Anyone who relies on e-mail as a sole method of contact is a fool. Anyone who uses e-mail and expects 100% delivery success is a fool. E-mail should be used to SUPLEMENT existing communications methods, not replace them. If more people understood this, then this wouldn't even be an issue.
If your ISP is blocked because they either overtly support spam, or they can't control the traffic out of their network, then they are selling you damaged goods. You have every right to be compensated by your ISP for your inability to send mail. That should cover the costs of smarthosting with someone else.
Then go beyond the ISP. Arrange to smarthost off of an unblocked friend. Or (GASP) pay someone to do it, then get your ISP to reimburse you since they sold you damaged goods. There are a lot of people out there (myself included) who would be willing to help out someone stuck in a collateral damage zone, assuming that someone wasn't busy whining and pouting and frothing at the mouth about being blocklisted in the first place.
I'm sure they are asking for it. We probably just don't see it. Did the NY mafia set up a hit on a rival by running a classified ad in the Times? Don't think so.
There are a number of "members only" spammer resources on the net. You hear about them every now and again in NANAE. While I can't say for certain what goes on in those places, you can bet they aren't swapping recipes...
Good point, but if it is signed, then it is not anonymous is it.
It doesn't need to be anonymous, just available. SpamCop isn't anonymous. Spamhaus isn't anonymous. SPEWS is anonymous, but they probably don't need to be, and they already have someone who is *NOT* anonymous distributing their lists via PGP signed e-mail (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spews).
ISPs that use these lists to reject mail are being irresponsible, and are most likely doing it without the knowledge of their users. One false positive that gets dropped is one too many when your users don't know it is happening.
I agree with you there 100%. ISPs *maybe* should offer it as an option, but shouldn't filter by default. I've seen some ISPs do some pretty stupid things with the blocklists (i.e. add the IP ranges to their core router's ACLs). Those admins should be shot.
Admittedly, though, I'm not nearly as concerned about false positives as most people. People tend to forget that e-mail in it's very nature is unreliable, and should never replace a phone call or good old fashioned face time.
A friend of mine, who has a business class DSL had his ip block blacklisted.
So, what was preventing him from smarthosting his mail through an unblocked mail server (i.e. his ISPs)? Assuming the ISPs mail server was on a different netblock, he'd then have no problem sending mail.
Seems to me nowadays people are more interested in bitching and complaining and pounding their chest on top of a soapbox than in implementing simple, effective solutions to their problems. Instead of going back and forth between his ISP and Monkeys, he could have been SENDING E-MAIL.
In case u didnt know its illegal to hire a black hat to cause damage to private property.
So whats your point? Spam is illegal in over 20 states. If that little fact doesn't bother the spammers, why would they suddenly start having moral objections to hiring hackers to silence their critics?
And you would trust this file enough to block email based on it's contents??? Accountability is the biggest problem with RBLs, and moving it to a completely anonymous system would loose the last level of trust that they currently have...
If you don't trust it, don't use it.
Why is this concept so damn hard for people to understand? These lists are VOLUNTARY. Mail server admins are not forced to use them. They CHOOSE to use them because they are EFFECTIVE.
Your arguement about putting these lists on freenet hold no water. There's no way these files would go online without a PGP signature, and people downloading them would be stupid not to verify that signature. So long as you trust the signer, you're fine. If you don't trust the signer, don't use the file.
The distribution of the files can be completely automated to the point where an automated script can download the file, verify the signature, and load the contents of the file into a locally running DNS server (I'll even be so bold as to suggest rbldns, which comes with the djbdns distribution). The distribution network would be all but impervious to denial of service, since the only way to bring it down would be to DDoS anything running the freenet client.
Funny how people conveniently forget about these little details when it doesn't suit their arguement...
Point of advise: read the post you're replying to *BEFORE* you start typing.
You've essentially made the same point as I have in an earlier post. My "freedom of speech" statement referred to Joe Jared's freedom to host a secondary SPEWS DNS server without getting the crap packeted out of him.
The EFF's position on spam sounds good, but is unrealistic. They fail to take into account the costs related to spam. They also fail to take into account the private property rights of the individuals and organizations that own and operate mail servers.
I don't know about you, but I'm not sending in my donation until they seriously re-evaluate their stance on this issue...
And forget about the Government doing anything effective. Until the anti-spam movement has a lobby as powerful as the DMA, we'll never make any progress at that level.
I stand corrected. Apparently there are two other people listed with Mark Felstein. Adam E. Miller, an attorney, and Bari Nemeroff, who is an IT recruiter.
This thread in NANAE has some info on these other guys.
Easy. Lets say I run a mail server. Let's say it's my employer's mail server. Let's say we pay for bandwidth based on utilization. Let's say we pay for and maintain all the hardware and software on the mail server.
Now, let's say we get flooded with spam. Let's say that, on average, each employee in the company gets between 60 and 100 spam messages a day. And let's say that said spam consumes 1/8 of your hardware and bandwidth resources.
So, the formula you're looking at is something like:
cost of spam = employee wasted time + sysadmin wasted time + (hardware maintenence costs * 1/8) + (bandwidth costs * 1/8)
You can see where $500 per email starts to get realistic. Mind you, I just neatly extracted this complex mathematic formula from the darkest recesses of my arse, so I don't know just how accurate it would be, but you can at least start to get the idea.
Now, magnify this exponentially. Instead of a corporate mail server, let's say it's an ISP mail server. Lets say the ISP has tens of thousands of subscribers. Let's say that, even though they offer filtering to their customers, they don't actively block any spam to avoid the possiblity of accidentally blocking non-spam.
Now you can begin to see that there are costs involved in spam that the average end user never sees.
While I have no love for spammers or their tactics, I am happy at least that Joe Jared and his Osirusoft list is done for.
So, what you're saying is that you support the use of DDoS attacks to silence people who are critical of unethical (and in some states illegal) activities? Because that's exactly what happened to Joe and Osirusoft.
Agree or disagree with SPEWS, it's pretty damn sad that nobody here on/. (besides me) has commented on this. I was always under the impression that freedom of speech was important to people here...
Thats the funny thing: they *DIDN'T* find the lawyer.
Mark Felstein is not only the representing council for EMarketersAmerica, he's also their sole corporate officer, and as far as anyone can tell, their only member. The EMA was formed mere weeks before the lawsuit was filed.
One of the defendants assertions has always been that EMarketersAmerica was formed for the sole purpose of filing the lawsuit. In fact, somewhere on the NANAE threads was a remark that Felstein admitted that he would dissolve EMarketersAmerica at his earliest opportunity once the lawsuit was resolved.
Of course, the defendants might have a thing or two to say about that...
The only problem with filtering is that by the time the spam makes it to your filters, your resources (bandwidth, disk space) have already been abused. This works fine if you don't pay for your bandwidth (or if you pay a low fixed rate, like for dialup), but anything more is wasteful.
Fat lot of good that did a lonely student who needed to contact university administration (only possible through email) to clear mistakes up so he could get his master's degree - and suddenly discovered his ISP being blackholed, with university using the blacklist.
If the asshat couldn't figure out to pick up a phone and call someone at the university, he doesn't *DESERVE* a masters degree.
I'm sure the people responsible for the e-mail system at that university made it very clear to their superiors what the ramifications of using the blocklists would be. Those superiors probably glanced over at the telephone on their desk and said the same thing I just said in the previous paragraph.
I cheered when Osirusoft went down, and I'm cheering now.
I'm cheering now because there's more than one way to get SPEWS than through Osirusoft, and I cheer every time I check my e-mail.
I'm not condoning this DDoS, but the perpetrator is probably just some sysadmin running a legitimate, secure server that found its way onto some blacklists and got frustrated by all the red tape getting off the lists. This may be his last hope to get off their list.
So, instead of doing something simple or rational like making arrangements to smarthost outbound mail through an unblocked mail server, he's breaking federal laws.
Yup.
Makes complete sense to me.
Like I said in an earlier post, if people would spend a little more time working WITH the blocklist instead of spending a lot of time working AGAINST the blocklist, the Internet would be a much better place...
Publishing a list which identifies my ISP as a spammer is slandering my ISP unless it is true. Facilitating others in blocking my email by intentionally inflicting harm on ME is a tort. Filing one suit when I have been harmed is NOT barratry.
Well, let's look at this for a sec: is it your ISP listed, or their upstream? If it's the upstream that's in SPEWS, your ISP definitely has a case for being sold faulty goods, breach of contract, etc.
If it is your ISP that is listed, and they can stand in front of a judge and state under oath that they have never facilitated in the sending of spam, they might have a case. A quick google search will yield anything thats been posting to news.admin.net-abuse.sightings all the way back to 1997 I think... search for your ISP and see what you find. You may be surprised.
And as far as chosing an ISP, perhaps you should try to understand that many people have exactly ONE choice in a high speed ISP.
In other words, my choice is to cease practicing my profession from my current office, or use this ISP.
And that's unfortunate that your only ISP choice happens to be a spam sewer. In an effort to mitigate damages, it would be very easy to make arrangements with a third party to smarthost your mail through their mail server (which is hopefully not blocked).
Don't get me wrong: collateral damage sucks. The only thing that sucks more though is half-cocked irrational responses. If people would be a little more rational, and would put a little thought into working *WITH* the blocklists and not *AGAINST*, we'd all be a lot better off (i.e. less spam *AND* less collateral damage).
This attitude I find so fucking disgusting I want to pound the fuck out of every dork ass who repeates it.
Eddy? Eddy Marin? Is that you? Because you sure are sounding like a spammer with whacked-pee-pee syndrome.
Is this fucking Soviet Russia?
Careful there... you're just a few thousand miles from Godwin's Law...
If in my valid course of business I should need to contact a customer via email who you are blocking from reciveing my email you are fucking your customer and mine.
If your sole method of contact with your customers is e-mail, then you have a severely flawed business model, bucko. If he's such an important customer, then chances are you have more than one way of contacting him. Quit being such a damn drama queen.
CHORUS: My Server, My Rules. If you don't like it, FOAD.
WTF do you get off blocking entire ISPs and personal email accounts?
REPEAT CHORUS
Apperently you consider being a System Administrator the same as god.
REPEAT CHORUS
You people need to exercise some due dilligance on your brains and understand not every person works for a mega corperation with an unlimited budget and staff who can change isp's or hosting services at the drop of a hat as you are apperently able to do. Some people are trying to run a operation on a very close margins.
I work for a small company with a very limited budget. I can't remember the specifics (I think it was some calculator on Cloudmark's website), but we figured out that spam costs us roughly $7,000 a year per employee in wasted time (at 40 employees we're talking $280,000 -- a lot of money these days). Blocklists like SPEWS save us money. That's money that we can roll back into the company and make it better. Maybe now you can understand why you're not getting much sympathy from me.
You fucking bigots make me sick. Fuck you very much for screwing of countless persons who are in valid business.
Your frothing and foaming at the mouth has been duly noted. If there were any doubts about you being a previously spanked spammer before, you just eliminated those doubts in two sentences.
I hope your fucking job goes off shore where incidentally most of this fucking spam comes from.
No, most of the world's spam is sent from Florida... probably not far from where you live... It gets pumped through foreign open proxies and relays and then ends up back in the US where it is promptly blocked by mine and countless other mail servers.
I don't have much hope for this post getting very much attention, seeing as this thread has already been taken over by crackpots an thinly disguised bulkers, all spreading their FUD.
But that ain't gonna stop me from trying...
Let me just start out by saying that I don't agree with what Joe has done with the list. I would be more inclined to support him if he were to just 'killall -9 named' and be done with it.
First: Osirusoft is *NOT* SPEWS. Joe Jared simply provided, free of charge, a copy of the SPEWS zone file via his RBL DNS server. He did not at any time have any influence over the content of the SPEWS list. People here complaining about talking to Joe and not getting a response obviously never read the FAQ on his site which clearly states this.
Second: SPEWS is *NOT DEAD*. There's another group out in Australia (I think) that offers a copy of the SPEWS zones, but I can't think of the name off the top of my head. Even so, it's only going to be a matter of time before three or four DNS servers pop up to take over for Osirusoft.
Third: SPEWS does *NOT BLOCK E-MAIL*. They simply provide a list. It's entirely up to system administrators to do what they wish with that list. Admittedly, though, I've seen some sysadmins do some really stupid things with SPEWS.
(IMHO, anyone who uses SPEWS (or any other blocklist for that matter), (a) should have an out-of-band contact method for people who are blocked, and (b) should maintain a whitelist of IPs that have a legitimate need to exchange mail but are blocked.)
Fourth: Nobody here seems to grasp the concept of private property. My server, my rules. If you don't like it, FOAD. It costs me money to maintain a mail server, and I've got every right to try to protect it from being slammed by spammers. If you are blocked as a result, that's just too bad. If you're someone I want to talk to, you can contact me out-of-band and I'll whitelist you.
Fifth: Imagine for a second if Microsoft decided it was going to DoS/. because they didn't like some of the articles posted here. A little far fetched, but that's exactly what has happened to Osirusoft. It distresses me that more people haven't caught on to this yet.
So, I hope this clears a few things up. Joe Jared deserves a lot of credit for having supported such a controvercial project such as SPEWS, and it's disappointing to see him taken down like this. It's equally disappointing to see so much FUD being tossed around in this thread.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who doubts what lengths a spammer will go to in order to protect their livelihood.
Slashdot Mirror
One customer becomes an involuntary helper of a spammer and all other customers are supposed to find external mail relays?
Not necessarally. One customer becomes an involuntary helper of a spammer, and the ISP should step in to mitigate the damage that customer causes. That's good network administration. That's common sense. That kind of action usually keeps ISPs off of blocklists.
And it's the ISPs fault that the customer didn't secure his system properly, so he must pay for all this?
If the ISP is either unwilling or unable to control their network and get rid of all the spammers or trojaned boxes, then yes, the ISP is 100% responsible. Why is this so difficult to understand?
Collateral damage is about as annoying as spam.
Collateral damage sucks. Don't get me wrong there. The problem here is that nobody seems to want to blame the right people. Everyone wants to blame the blocklists because they're a stationary target. Nobody wants to blame the spammers or the ISPs that support/ignore them. If ISPs were more proactive in eliminating spam from their networks, there would be no need for blocklists, ergo no collateral damage.
I'd even say that it is worse, because - unlike spam - there is very little you can do about it yourself, sometimes you don't even notice that you're blacklisted before important mail is lost.
There is no such thing as "very important mail". By design, e-mail is not reliable. Hell, by design the whole damn Internet is unreliable. Anyone who relies on e-mail as a sole method of contact is a fool. Anyone who uses e-mail and expects 100% delivery success is a fool. E-mail should be used to SUPLEMENT existing communications methods, not replace them. If more people understood this, then this wouldn't even be an issue.
If your ISP is blocked because they either overtly support spam, or they can't control the traffic out of their network, then they are selling you damaged goods. You have every right to be compensated by your ISP for your inability to send mail. That should cover the costs of smarthosting with someone else.
Then go beyond the ISP. Arrange to smarthost off of an unblocked friend. Or (GASP) pay someone to do it, then get your ISP to reimburse you since they sold you damaged goods. There are a lot of people out there (myself included) who would be willing to help out someone stuck in a collateral damage zone, assuming that someone wasn't busy whining and pouting and frothing at the mouth about being blocklisted in the first place.
I'm sure they are asking for it. We probably just don't see it. Did the NY mafia set up a hit on a rival by running a classified ad in the Times? Don't think so.
There are a number of "members only" spammer resources on the net. You hear about them every now and again in NANAE. While I can't say for certain what goes on in those places, you can bet they aren't swapping recipes...
Good point, but if it is signed, then it is not anonymous is it.
It doesn't need to be anonymous, just available. SpamCop isn't anonymous. Spamhaus isn't anonymous. SPEWS is anonymous, but they probably don't need to be, and they already have someone who is *NOT* anonymous distributing their lists via PGP signed e-mail (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spews).
ISPs that use these lists to reject mail are being irresponsible, and are most likely doing it without the knowledge of their users. One false positive that gets dropped is one too many when your users don't know it is happening.
I agree with you there 100%. ISPs *maybe* should offer it as an option, but shouldn't filter by default. I've seen some ISPs do some pretty stupid things with the blocklists (i.e. add the IP ranges to their core router's ACLs). Those admins should be shot.
Admittedly, though, I'm not nearly as concerned about false positives as most people. People tend to forget that e-mail in it's very nature is unreliable, and should never replace a phone call or good old fashioned face time.
A friend of mine, who has a business class DSL had his ip block blacklisted.
So, what was preventing him from smarthosting his mail through an unblocked mail server (i.e. his ISPs)? Assuming the ISPs mail server was on a different netblock, he'd then have no problem sending mail.
Seems to me nowadays people are more interested in bitching and complaining and pounding their chest on top of a soapbox than in implementing simple, effective solutions to their problems. Instead of going back and forth between his ISP and Monkeys, he could have been SENDING E-MAIL.
In case u didnt know its illegal to hire a black hat to cause damage to private property.
So whats your point? Spam is illegal in over 20 states. If that little fact doesn't bother the spammers, why would they suddenly start having moral objections to hiring hackers to silence their critics?
And you would trust this file enough to block email based on it's contents??? Accountability is the biggest problem with RBLs, and moving it to a completely anonymous system would loose the last level of trust that they currently have...
If you don't trust it, don't use it.
Why is this concept so damn hard for people to understand? These lists are VOLUNTARY. Mail server admins are not forced to use them. They CHOOSE to use them because they are EFFECTIVE.
Your arguement about putting these lists on freenet hold no water. There's no way these files would go online without a PGP signature, and people downloading them would be stupid not to verify that signature. So long as you trust the signer, you're fine. If you don't trust the signer, don't use the file.
The distribution of the files can be completely automated to the point where an automated script can download the file, verify the signature, and load the contents of the file into a locally running DNS server (I'll even be so bold as to suggest rbldns, which comes with the djbdns distribution). The distribution network would be all but impervious to denial of service, since the only way to bring it down would be to DDoS anything running the freenet client.
Funny how people conveniently forget about these little details when it doesn't suit their arguement...
Point of advise: read the post you're replying to *BEFORE* you start typing.
You've essentially made the same point as I have in an earlier post. My "freedom of speech" statement referred to Joe Jared's freedom to host a secondary SPEWS DNS server without getting the crap packeted out of him.
Why not sue 'em out of Virgina where spamming is a criminal act? That might just be a suitable deterrent...
The EFF's position on spam sounds good, but is unrealistic. They fail to take into account the costs related to spam. They also fail to take into account the private property rights of the individuals and organizations that own and operate mail servers.
I don't know about you, but I'm not sending in my donation until they seriously re-evaluate their stance on this issue...
And forget about the Government doing anything effective. Until the anti-spam movement has a lobby as powerful as the DMA, we'll never make any progress at that level.
I stand corrected. Apparently there are two other people listed with Mark Felstein. Adam E. Miller, an attorney, and Bari Nemeroff, who is an IT recruiter. This thread in NANAE has some info on these other guys.
How can you prove the damages are $500 per email.
Easy. Lets say I run a mail server. Let's say it's my employer's mail server. Let's say we pay for bandwidth based on utilization. Let's say we pay for and maintain all the hardware and software on the mail server.
Now, let's say we get flooded with spam. Let's say that, on average, each employee in the company gets between 60 and 100 spam messages a day. And let's say that said spam consumes 1/8 of your hardware and bandwidth resources.
So, the formula you're looking at is something like:
cost of spam = employee wasted time + sysadmin wasted time + (hardware maintenence costs * 1/8) + (bandwidth costs * 1/8)
You can see where $500 per email starts to get realistic. Mind you, I just neatly extracted this complex mathematic formula from the darkest recesses of my arse, so I don't know just how accurate it would be, but you can at least start to get the idea.
Now, magnify this exponentially. Instead of a corporate mail server, let's say it's an ISP mail server. Lets say the ISP has tens of thousands of subscribers. Let's say that, even though they offer filtering to their customers, they don't actively block any spam to avoid the possiblity of accidentally blocking non-spam.
Now you can begin to see that there are costs involved in spam that the average end user never sees.
While I have no love for spammers or their tactics, I am happy at least that Joe Jared and his Osirusoft list is done for.
/. (besides me) has commented on this. I was always under the impression that freedom of speech was important to people here...
So, what you're saying is that you support the use of DDoS attacks to silence people who are critical of unethical (and in some states illegal) activities? Because that's exactly what happened to Joe and Osirusoft.
Agree or disagree with SPEWS, it's pretty damn sad that nobody here on
Thats the funny thing: they *DIDN'T* find the lawyer.
Mark Felstein is not only the representing council for EMarketersAmerica, he's also their sole corporate officer, and as far as anyone can tell, their only member. The EMA was formed mere weeks before the lawsuit was filed.
One of the defendants assertions has always been that EMarketersAmerica was formed for the sole purpose of filing the lawsuit. In fact, somewhere on the NANAE threads was a remark that Felstein admitted that he would dissolve EMarketersAmerica at his earliest opportunity once the lawsuit was resolved.
Of course, the defendants might have a thing or two to say about that...
Finally, someone with a rational opinion! :-)
The only problem with filtering is that by the time the spam makes it to your filters, your resources (bandwidth, disk space) have already been abused. This works fine if you don't pay for your bandwidth (or if you pay a low fixed rate, like for dialup), but anything more is wasteful.
Fat lot of good that did a lonely student who needed to contact university administration (only possible through email) to clear mistakes up so he could get his master's degree - and suddenly discovered his ISP being blackholed, with university using the blacklist.
If the asshat couldn't figure out to pick up a phone and call someone at the university, he doesn't *DESERVE* a masters degree.
I'm sure the people responsible for the e-mail system at that university made it very clear to their superiors what the ramifications of using the blocklists would be. Those superiors probably glanced over at the telephone on their desk and said the same thing I just said in the previous paragraph.
I cheered when Osirusoft went down, and I'm cheering now.
I'm cheering now because there's more than one way to get SPEWS than through Osirusoft, and I cheer every time I check my e-mail.
I'm not condoning this DDoS, but the perpetrator is probably just some sysadmin running a legitimate, secure server that found its way onto some blacklists and got frustrated by all the red tape getting off the lists. This may be his last hope to get off their list.
So, instead of doing something simple or rational like making arrangements to smarthost outbound mail through an unblocked mail server, he's breaking federal laws.
Yup.
Makes complete sense to me.
Like I said in an earlier post, if people would spend a little more time working WITH the blocklist instead of spending a lot of time working AGAINST the blocklist, the Internet would be a much better place...
Publishing a list which identifies my ISP as a spammer is slandering my ISP unless it is true. Facilitating others in blocking my email by intentionally inflicting harm on ME is a tort. Filing one suit when I have been harmed is NOT barratry.
Well, let's look at this for a sec: is it your ISP listed, or their upstream? If it's the upstream that's in SPEWS, your ISP definitely has a case for being sold faulty goods, breach of contract, etc.
If it is your ISP that is listed, and they can stand in front of a judge and state under oath that they have never facilitated in the sending of spam, they might have a case. A quick google search will yield anything thats been posting to news.admin.net-abuse.sightings all the way back to 1997 I think... search for your ISP and see what you find. You may be surprised.
And as far as chosing an ISP, perhaps you should try to understand that many people have exactly ONE choice in a high speed ISP.
In other words, my choice is to cease practicing my profession from my current office, or use this ISP.
And that's unfortunate that your only ISP choice happens to be a spam sewer. In an effort to mitigate damages, it would be very easy to make arrangements with a third party to smarthost your mail through their mail server (which is hopefully not blocked).
Don't get me wrong: collateral damage sucks. The only thing that sucks more though is half-cocked irrational responses. If people would be a little more rational, and would put a little thought into working *WITH* the blocklists and not *AGAINST*, we'd all be a lot better off (i.e. less spam *AND* less collateral damage).
This attitude I find so fucking disgusting I want to pound the fuck out of every dork ass who repeates it.
Eddy? Eddy Marin? Is that you? Because you sure are sounding like a spammer with whacked-pee-pee syndrome.
Is this fucking Soviet Russia?
Careful there... you're just a few thousand miles from Godwin's Law...
If in my valid course of business I should need to contact a customer via email who you are blocking from reciveing my email you are fucking your customer and mine.
If your sole method of contact with your customers is e-mail, then you have a severely flawed business model, bucko. If he's such an important customer, then chances are you have more than one way of contacting him. Quit being such a damn drama queen.
CHORUS: My Server, My Rules. If you don't like it, FOAD.
WTF do you get off blocking entire ISPs and personal email accounts?
REPEAT CHORUS
Apperently you consider being a System Administrator the same as god.
REPEAT CHORUS
You people need to exercise some due dilligance on your brains and understand not every person works for a mega corperation with an unlimited budget and staff who can change isp's or hosting services at the drop of a hat as you are apperently able to do. Some people are trying to run a operation on a very close margins.
I work for a small company with a very limited budget. I can't remember the specifics (I think it was some calculator on Cloudmark's website), but we figured out that spam costs us roughly $7,000 a year per employee in wasted time (at 40 employees we're talking $280,000 -- a lot of money these days). Blocklists like SPEWS save us money. That's money that we can roll back into the company and make it better. Maybe now you can understand why you're not getting much sympathy from me.
You fucking bigots make me sick. Fuck you very much for screwing of countless persons who are in valid business.
Your frothing and foaming at the mouth has been duly noted. If there were any doubts about you being a previously spanked spammer before, you just eliminated those doubts in two sentences.
I hope your fucking job goes off shore where incidentally most of this fucking spam comes from.
No, most of the world's spam is sent from Florida... probably not far from where you live... It gets pumped through foreign open proxies and relays and then ends up back in the US where it is promptly blocked by mine and countless other mail servers.
Oh, and $50 says your job goes before mine.
I don't have much hope for this post getting very much attention, seeing as this thread has already been taken over by crackpots an thinly disguised bulkers, all spreading their FUD.
/. because they didn't like some of the articles posted here. A little far fetched, but that's exactly what has happened to Osirusoft. It distresses me that more people haven't caught on to this yet.
But that ain't gonna stop me from trying...
Let me just start out by saying that I don't agree with what Joe has done with the list. I would be more inclined to support him if he were to just 'killall -9 named' and be done with it.
First: Osirusoft is *NOT* SPEWS. Joe Jared simply provided, free of charge, a copy of the SPEWS zone file via his RBL DNS server. He did not at any time have any influence over the content of the SPEWS list. People here complaining about talking to Joe and not getting a response obviously never read the FAQ on his site which clearly states this.
Second: SPEWS is *NOT DEAD*. There's another group out in Australia (I think) that offers a copy of the SPEWS zones, but I can't think of the name off the top of my head. Even so, it's only going to be a matter of time before three or four DNS servers pop up to take over for Osirusoft.
Third: SPEWS does *NOT BLOCK E-MAIL*. They simply provide a list. It's entirely up to system administrators to do what they wish with that list. Admittedly, though, I've seen some sysadmins do some really stupid things with SPEWS.
(IMHO, anyone who uses SPEWS (or any other blocklist for that matter), (a) should have an out-of-band contact method for people who are blocked, and (b) should maintain a whitelist of IPs that have a legitimate need to exchange mail but are blocked.)
Fourth: Nobody here seems to grasp the concept of private property. My server, my rules. If you don't like it, FOAD. It costs me money to maintain a mail server, and I've got every right to try to protect it from being slammed by spammers. If you are blocked as a result, that's just too bad. If you're someone I want to talk to, you can contact me out-of-band and I'll whitelist you.
Fifth: Imagine for a second if Microsoft decided it was going to DoS
So, I hope this clears a few things up. Joe Jared deserves a lot of credit for having supported such a controvercial project such as SPEWS, and it's disappointing to see him taken down like this. It's equally disappointing to see so much FUD being tossed around in this thread.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who doubts what lengths a spammer will go to in order to protect their livelihood.