On Sat, 31 May 2003, Bill Cole wrote:
At 6:08 PM -0500 5/30/03, Joe Laffey imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding: >On Fri, 30 May 2003, Neil Herber wrote: > >> If you are using the Spamcop RBL (like me) you probably won't see >> this message. It looks like SIMS has been blacklisted since this >> morning. I only noticed it when scanning the logs. I temporarily >> commented out the Spamcop RBL - so I should get this! > >This is why most public RBLs are worth anything, IMHO. They blacklist too >much good mail for no reason, and are too difficult to get off of.
That's a gross generalization.
Well, yes.
>They >are not "governed" well, and typically run by zealots. The whole guilty >until proven innocent mentality is absurd...
It sounds like you are talking about SPEWS. I hear NJABL is a bit like that too, but it is not very widely used.
SPEWS seems to be the main offender here. But many people do not realize that relays.osirusoft.com incorprates spews (I think it still does). So admins blindly start using rbls not know the implications.
The problem is this guilty until proven innocent mentality of many RBL operators.
What is your definition of 'many' in that sentence?
I really have not encountered that mentality in the operators of The One And Only RBL (i.e. MAPS) or in the operators of other widely used DNSBL's aside from SPEWS, SpamCop and NJABL. Steve Linford certainly operates the SBL on a Proven Guilty basis, as it seems Wirehub/Easynet does for their list, and certainly the Blitzed OPM only lists Proven Guilty machines. Most of the open relay lists also list only on an objective basis of whether a machine is in fact an open relay, and despite holes in their nomination practices in fact mostly only list open relays that have been used for spam.
SpamCop's problem is not zealotry but excess trust in automation and the intelligence of users.
Again, machines have no mercy. Something gets reported then it is "guilty". I value my users' legit email enough to steer clear of these rbls. I run my own rbl with millions of hosts listed. If we block legit email I fix it ASAP (which has only happened a couple of times).
I do the same thing, and my list (http://www.scconsult.com/blacklist.shtml) actually is a list of 'guilty until proven innocent' addresses in a sense. If you happen to be on one of the listed networks, you need to provide a positive reason for me to accept your mail. Those networks landed on the default-reject list here because of real problems with the real owners of that network space, so while they are 'proven guilty' at the level of the listings, there are a number of places where 'proven innocent' addresses have been knocked out of ranges whose ultimate owners are irresponsible or worse. The most noticeable such cases in that list are the holes I've punched in AT&T's cesspit.
-- Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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