On 24-Nov-97 Evan Leibovitch wrote:
>> The RBL is a Good Thing. It will probably be Needed for quite some time.
>
> I will continue to agree, but only on the balance. I still consider it a
> Neceesary Evil, that should voluntarily self-destruct the moment spamming
> is generally revealed to be unprofitable.
I have a little something to say on this matter too. My home connectivity is
through a friend who has a high-speed connection and allows me the use of a
small block of IP addresses at a very good price. The problem is that the
network routing goes through a well-intentioned, but in my opinion misguided,
net admin. In his zeal to make spamming unprofitable, he has shut off all
packets from AGIS.
During the course of the conversion of a mail server on a different network
from smail to exim, I changed the mail routing to a system on my home network.
This resulted in a large and growing backlog of undeliverable mail and became
obvious that the domains that I MX for were missing a significant portion of
incoming email as well. This forced me to expidite the cutover with less
testing that I had originally planned.
I am a big boy now. I am quite capable of deciding for myself who I will and
will not accept mail from and for. One main reason for putting exim in place on
that server was the configuration items that enable me to set policy with finer
granularity than was possible with smail. I resent someone making a blanket
decision for me and disrupting my network operations.
If rbl is going to be supported by exim, fine with me, it is another tool in
the toolbox. But please allow me a little more configuration than enable or
disable. I would like to see something along the lines of:
rbl_check_networks, rbl_check_hosts, rbl_except_networks and rbl_except_hosts
where if I get a connection from a configurable list of networks or hosts that
I suspect are likely spammers, I check rbl. Otherwise, I never check. The
except listings would be for "known good" hosts or nets in an otherwise spammer
infested netblock or domain that are never checked against rbl.
I am not against rbl but I am against being stripped of choice in the matter
and this might allow mail to get through from good hosts on bad nets.
--
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