>From: Evan Leibovitch <evan@???>
>
>There is a good reason why the RBL maintainers have to be very careful
>about their relationship with anti-competition laws that exist in the US
>and elsewhere.
What? Using the RBL is voluntary. Perhaps I missed something in
the pages at maps.vix.com, but I did not see anything about
"anti-competition laws".
>I'm trying to consider the effect on blameless victims, such as the
>non-spamming customers of spam-friendly sites. And let's not blind
>ourselves out of righteous indignation, RBL *will* produce some innocent
>casualties.
Sure. And they can complain to their provider. If a site is that
worried about the effects of the RBL, __don't use it__.
>But take a look at what RBL does. It doesn't block domains or users, it
>blocks at the IP address level. It makes no distinction between spammers
>and unknowing subscribers of spam-friendly services.
True, but in exim there is an rbl_except_net list, isn't there?
>I don't appreciate the implication that because I don't see RBL as the
>be-all and end-all, I want to deal with (and by inference encourage)
>spammers. I believe that anyone who *doesn't* realize real non-spamming
>people will be hurt by this scheme is dreaming.
I did not imply you encouraged spammers at all. All I said
was that for most of us, the rbl_except_net list will be more
than sufficient to allow in those networks on the RBL that we
still choose to deal with.
>I also believe that there is a grey area between spam and solicited
>commercial email solicitations, with which binary solutions such as RBL
>are incapable of coping. It is in these grey areas where the RBL people
>are on their shakiest legal footings.
Again with the "legal" aspect. Use of the RBL is __optional__.
Plus, I do not want ANY unsolicted email. Period.
If it's not from a client of mine, or the mail is not relevant to the
sites I maintain, or I did not ask to receive it, it is Theft of Service.
Whatever degree of SPAM it is, I do not want it.
>> 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.
Yes, like hardware is a necessary evil (so says the software engineer).
And, again, as soon as you want to quit using the RBL, merely
comment out those features in your exim configure file.
And/Or fall back onto your own private RBL (like we do in pre-rbl versions
of Exim). We maintain a large list here of over 1200 sites and addresses
we do not accept email from. And, it has lots of tuning ability.
For example, we block ALL of earthlink.net. But, I have friends
that still use them, so they are on an except list here. It's easy.
Use of the RBL, the rbl_except_net list, and the current blocking
features of Exim should provide tremendous amounts of flexibility
and control over what networks get in, even if there are good seeds
inside of bad apples.
Speaking for the sites that I maintain, we will use the RBL until
SPAM, like Junk Faxes, is a relic of the past.
-cc
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