My home site (toad.com) has been on the ORBS blacklist for months. So
far it seems to have little effect on who can receive mail from me. I
also receive and handle the bounces from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Only
two or three subscribers (out of more than 500) have started bouncing
as a result of ORBS blacklisting the site.
If people choose to not receive mail based not on the *content* of the
mail, but on the *IP address of the last hop forwarding it*, they are
just encouraging spammers to abuse helpful and innocent sites.
Meanwhile they simultaneously block real communication among
legitimate correspondants. The blacklisters contribute to the
problem; they do not solve it. They are striking out in rage, and
their thoughtless response simply magnifies the spam problem and
encourages other kinds of thoughtless censorship. There are true
social problems when anyone can talk to anyone cheaply, but the
blacklisters are not contributing to solving them.
If the entire world stopped forwarding email for each other, it would
be a much harder place to communicate. I refuse to participate in
that trend. Various of my users forward mail through toad.com BECAUSE
they move around a lot, connect via various ISPs and various Ethernets
where they're visiting, and their mail kept getting clogged by "anti
spam" measures. Running a mailer which attempts to deliver mail,
rather than one which attempts to reject it, is a feature, not a bug.
(And when I find a non-user of toad forwarding large numbers of real
spams through it, I cut 'em off.)
One site, MediaWays.net, stopped accepting mail from linux-ipsec a few
days ago because of the ORBS blacklist. Every message to linux-ipsec
resulted in me getting a piece of unwanted email from mediaways.net --
a bounce message. Their naive "spam filter" generated more spam in my
mailbox than all the spammers who have ever sent mail to linux-ipsec
(135 spam messages have appeared on linux-ipsec from 2/26/98 thru
today, as classified by me after *reading* the messages). After a
short dialogue in which MediaWays self-righteously told me how to
manage the system halfway around the world that graciously hosts my
mailing list, I unsubscribed the single linux-ipsec reader at
mediaways.net, and we are both apparently happy now.
I suggest that you, Mr. Warfield, unsubscribe as well, if you value
your ability to NOT communicate more than you value your participation
in the linux-ipsec mailing list. But please don't continue the
off-topic postings about how we should change how the list is
administered because you and your censorial buddies at ORBS don't like
it. Discuss it with me personally instead, and let's let the rest of
the list get back to its purpose.
John Gilmore
