RE: [Exim] rbl server spews...

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Author: Matthew Palmer
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: RE: [Exim] rbl server spews...
On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Eli wrote:

> SPEWS is nearly impossible to get removed from. I work for a very large web


Oooh, a whacked peepee!

> hosting company, and they have black listed practically all our ips because
> of ONE client who hosted with us about 2-3 years ago and spammed. We caught


And how long did the spam go on for before you shut them down? And removed
all trace of them from your systems? "Shortly" is such a relative term...
"Shortly" might be a week, but that's a hell of a lot of spam. And does
"receive" mean "read", or "delivered"? If you only read abuse@ once a week,
and then took a week to shut them down, that's two weeks worth of spam...

> them shortly after receiving some complaints and instantly closed their
> accounts. We have tried contacting the SPEWS folk, but the *only* way they
> let you contact them is via public news groups - fine if they actually read
> them!


Let me quote you a portion of the SPEWS FAQ you obviously failed to read and
comprehend:

Q41: How does one contact SPEWS?

A41: One does not.

The mention of nanae is as a place to discuss spam issues. Not to contact
SPEWS. Furrfu.

At any rate, it may not even be *your* addresses listed in SPEWS. If you're
renting those addresses from someone else, (say your upstream) it may be
their inaction that has caused your addresses to be listed, in which case,
it's time to move.

> Anyways, several years later and our ips are still blocked and we never hear


So contact those who are blocking them and ask to be whitelisted. If the
recipient really wants your e-mail, they'll be happy to do so.

> a word from anyone at SPEWS about any of the posts we put in their forums,


SPEWS doesn't have fora, just to be pedantic...

> so we just gave up and tell anyone who complains about us being blocked that
> SPEWS is trash and there's nothing we can do (which we can't).


There are plenty of things you can do. If you listened in nanae, you'll
know all the options.

> This is why I really hate when people deny connections/emails based on
> remotely maintained RBL lists - at most you should use something like


You can hate it all you want, but it's their systems, so they get to pick
who they talk to.

> spamassasin and just give it a weight of some sort, but still deliver the
> message. Let the end user filter out the spam from the real stuff. If not,
> it's just like your postman/woman throwing out some of your mail that they
> think is garbage, before you even get to see any of it! I'm sure you
> wouldn't want that happening, even if it was just garbage!


Really bad analogy:

1) The postal service is usually an entity contractually obligated to
deliver mail. In the general case, there is no contractual obligation to
accept any mail.

2) there are plenty of people (as you have seen in other responses to your
post) who would like such a feature. People are almost as incensed by
dead-tree spam as e-mail spam - the difference being that there is an
economic limit to how much dead-tree spam you can get, while there are only
effective technical limits to the volume of e-mail spam - and that would kill
legitimate e-mail, too.


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Matthew Palmer, Geek In Residence
http://ieee.uow.edu.au/~mjp16