At 1:09 AM -0600 7/16/01, Cerebus The Aardvark imposed structure on
a stream of electrons, yielding:
>>On 7/14/01 7:08 PM, "Tom Wiebe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> So what do we do now? We are running email just for our client's sites,
>>> not a large list, and the $200/year subscription fee is a little pricey
>>> for our needs. Are the new ORBS lists any better than the old one? i.e.
>>> are they lists of mail servers that are misconfigured or are they lists
>>> of mail servers that the owners of the list have a grudge with, like the
>> > old ORBS list?
>
>I'm surprised there isn't more discussion of this.
There has been in other places...
>I think this is going to be a bad thing that backfires on MAPS. The
>reason that MAPS is useful is that anyone can use it. If I have to
>pay to use it (and I'm not about to pay since my mailserver does not
>generate money) then that's one less server that is blocking spam.
>Less blocked spam in general is a bad thing.
I suspect that it is MAPS' only option. In April MAPS eliminated half
of their jobs (including mine and my entire department) for financial
reasons. I don't see any reason to believe that MAPS' financial state
has improved since, and they still have 3 lawsuits pending, which
means bleeding money extra-swiftly. (i.e. to lawyers)
>Besides, about 80% of the spam I see now is not being blocked by
>MAPS anyway. I have 722 spam messages in the last 25 days. I see
>0-5 emails blocked most days and up to 20 blacklist blocks on "big"
>days in my logs. Given that easily half of these spams are hitting
>my internal blacklist of China Telecom (61.128.0.0 - 61.143.255.255
>202.96.0.0 - 202.111.255.255) I don't see the subscription being
>worth my money. What I will do is scour my logs for all the ips
>that have hit the blacklists this year and add them manually into
>the blacklist list.
This surprises me, if you are using RSS and DUL. The RBL itself
catches very little for me, but the other two lists do real work.
>In principal less than $20 a month is not a lot of money, certainly
>not for an ISP or a business with lots of employees... but I would
>be hard pressed to extort $200/year out of my friends and family
>simply to pay for a slight decrease in incoming spam.
MAPS has been pretty clear elsewhere that they will be making
accommodations for hobbyist/personal systems. Paul Vixie has said
that no one would be turned away for lack of ability to pay. (Hmmm...
I wonder if since he laid me off he'd be willing to give me free
access... I suppose I need to ask) My suspicion is that the core
needs for MAPS are to make sure that all users have made an explicit
usage agreement AND to get a few big freeloading ISP's to start
actually paying for their spam-control. MAPS can't cut costs much by
reducing how many users they have, but they can make up some of the
expense if they can get big commercial providers to pay and it may be
legally helpful to have every direct user sign a contract that
clearly defines what the MAPS lists are.
--
Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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