On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 08:12, Steve Yuroff wrote: > That's the first report I've had of the spamlist.org database bouncing > mail from a legit source. > > Are you saying that spamlist.org and the add-in rulesets I'm using are > crap? They seemed to be useful, legit tools to me, but I'm here to > learn. If it's to be avoided, I'm all for it. > > My understanding was that the spamlist.org list would cut my processing > load at the MTA level... isn't it easier to not accept the mail, than > to accept it and then process it for ham/spam?
Unfortunately it seems that a log of ISPs are buying that line and just using blacklists to reject e-mail outright. I hate spam, which is why I've installed SA locally, and I'm sure that I'm doing a much better job of filtering spam than my isp is. Most of the blacklists claim that they have a very low false-positive rate, but then most if not all warn against discarding mail based on the BL alone. I first became aware of the isp/rbl problem when I tried to trace down why yahoo groups was periodically suspending sending me mail because I was bouncing it. The bounce history showed that my ISP was giving hard bounces because the particular yahoo server was blacklisted temporarily on spamcop.net. It was no use trying to convince my ISP that they should not use an RBL to block mail, they LOVED the fact that the load on their servers was reduced. The problem is that they had no way of knowing whether or not the mail they were rejecting was in fact legitimate. More recently I've had more problems just trying to sign up for some support lists on sourceforge, because the registration confirmation email never got to me. I finally resorted to opening up my own MTA and got the email immediately via this back channel. Using RBLs as one input to a filtering tool like SA might be a good idea, but from what I'm seeing the growing trend towards using them to block e-mails is a very bad one. I'm beginning to think that the USPS is doing a better job of actually delivering my mail than a lot of ISPs do. Sorry for the rant!
