...and from the horse's mouth:
How Sunbelt wound up on the MAPS real-time blackhole list
and why we decided to stay on it
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/rbl_story.htm
So how did Sunbelt wind up on the RBL?
Sunbelt has been working hard to service the Windows NT/2000 community
since 1996 and write a e-zine for our customers and prospects since
that time. We created a database of email addresses, in the first years
in opt-out fashion. June 2000, after our run-in with MAPS we changed
that to double opt-in. There are no federal laws yet against opt-out
though. We have never spammed anyone (using the spam definition that
describes it as either using a subject line that is deceiving, forged
headers, or illegal use of some one else's mail server).
Yes, we freely admit in our early years we have sent the newsletter
partially in opt-out fashion, as was common in the early Internet
years, but we always honored unsubscribes, and even have a full time
employee to handle list related requests.
A company's database of customers and
prospects is its most valuable asset. It took us 87 man-years to create
the 600,000 email addresses, and many millions of dollars. The way we
built the database was in three ways. First, people heard about it from
friends and opted in. Second, people on our website downloaded tools
and their names were automatically subbed to the list in an opt-out
fashion. We surveyed that three years ago and something like 97%
preferred it that way at that time.
Last, sometimes we get lists of email addresses from
our vendors (almost always the people we sell software for). They
confirm us these addresses are interested in our products and are
willing (opted in) to receive email from relevant companies. Well, here
is where the screwup occurred. We got a relatively large list from a
vendor and added that list to our email database and sent them our
newsletter. Turns out there were a good bunch of harvested addresses
from the WHOIS database in there. Ouch. Our bad. We got flak from all
sides.
...
Matt wrote:
Darin Cox
wrote:
W2KNews doesn't seem to care much about
RBLs. I've talked to Stu a couple
of times over the past couple of years about this due to their being
listed
on some, but they've never done anything about it. Right now they're
listed
on MAILPOLICE-BULK and SBL, and also have the CMDSPACE flaw. That's
enough
to push them over our hold limit.
Maybe sending out self-congradulatory spam to promote their own spam
blocking product might have something to do with their listings???
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=w2knews.com+group:*abuse*&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d&selm=200306040029.h540TBLp012421%40calcite.rhyolite.com&rnum=1
Here's his Spamhaus listing showing the extent to which they tried to
get him to cooperate with best practices (i.e. not spamming
involuntarily or otherwise):
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL3704
My guess is that I'm probably blocking this newsletter currently,
however when situations like this appear, I wait for customers to
report it as a false positive instead of taking action without
prompting.
Matt
--
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