David Dyer-Bennet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I don't mind ORBS publishing the list of known open relays, and I don't
> mind ORBS accepting open-relay reports based on scans (or even running
> their own).
> I find RSS not adequate and RBL badly inadequate (though I continue to
> use it to help them be the big stick you describe, a goal I definitely
> support and which I have seen work well).
Fair enough.
> I'd like to use ORBS, but in fact I find the politics intolerable and
> the arbitrary behavior too risky. I don't know the details of the
> alleged "spamming" -- it sounds like they're bulk-mailing stuff to the
> admins of open relays?
That too, yeah, although I can see some justification for that. I'm not
all that overly comfortable with it *when they don't have a spam in hand*;
if they have a spam in hand, I think it's entirely and completely
reasonable to contact the server, but when it's never been spammed
through, it's mildly more borderline in my mind.
But no, I was talking specifically about their probes. Several of their
probes use both mangled return paths and mangled recipients that look like
their local. Any mail setup where the SMTP listener doesn't know what
accounts are valid (not only qmail, but also any number of different
firewall or secondary MX setups) is going to generate internal
double-bounces from that that end up in the postmaster mailbox.
ORBS is aware that they're dumping mail into the postmaster mailbox. If
they only did a test when they had evidence that the system was open, I
can accept that. I can even accept retesting open relays. But when the
system doesn't relay and has never relayed, constantly *retesting* it and
dumping that mail in the postmaster's mailbox seems wrong. Sure, it's not
that much spam, but when you have a number of hosts with mail setups like
that, it starts slowly adding up. And of course, their answer to it is to
just press delete.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
