Re: [exim] abuse report

On 8 Nov 2004, Mike Lima wrote:

> I am a user of Exim since beginning, but now I have to report a
> condition of abuse of those, controlling realtime black lists.

What on earth has your ill-informed, pointless rant got to do with Exim?

> They feel like prepotent and arrogant gods with final decision to block
> countries, continents, etc, at the first spam they receive from those
> places.

Do stop being silly. You use Exim, right? So you know full well that lists
don't block anyone, e-mail administrators do. Nobody forces anyone to use
a list. In many cases (some SORBS lists being examples), lists are
fact-based lists, clearly delineated by purpose (for example dialup lines,
or countries). It is the choice of the end recipient administrator about
whether they choose to block dialup lines, for example.

(That's not to say that blacklist operators don't have some moral
responsibility to operate their list in accordance with the rules they set
out, but that's a different issue. It's true that, for example, Spamhaus
wield a fair amount of power and could certainly theoretically abuse that,
but your complaint seems to be that lists of dialups, countries etc. even
*exist* in the first place, not that they are doing things beyond their
stated purposes)

You should be speaking to the administrators of the systems that you are
trying to send mail to, not to the blacklist operators and especially not
to exim-users.

Let's take for an example blackholes.us. They provide lists of IPs by
countries. Now, you may think that blocking a whole country is stupid and
that's a reasonable opinion. However, complaining at blackholes.us is
stupid, because they have just provided a list. That list could be used
for all kinds of purposes, not necessarily even related to e-mail. They
are not magically blocking your e-mail by merely providing a list. It's
the recipient (or their administrator) that's chosen to use that list in
such a way which blocks you. Your complaint is with them, not with
blackholes.us. Ditto for SORBS et al.

> I agree that you can create a block list, but not by IP.

That's a stupid argument. Some IP blacklists are a tremendous resource and
useful way of blocking spam.

> Lists like sorbs forces you to pay 50 dollars for charity, to have your
> name dropped from the list.

And? (OK, so I think that is possibly a bit harsh, but at the end of the
day nobody is forced to use SORBS as a basis of blocking.)

> The problem is not on just sorbs. They are just the guys forcing you to
> donate. They tell that the money is to pay for their work of taking you
> in and out the list. The problem is that they cannot charge for
> something nobody asked them to do.

To be frank, unless you have a contract with them contradicting this, I
don't see why not. If you think they are evil for trying to charge you $50
to get out of their list, then contact all the recipients that are
blocking you based on SORBS and explain to them your problem. Maybe they
will all stop using SORBS and your problem will go away. A DNS blacklist
has only the power assigned to it by its users.

> I think exim could analyze this issue of power abuse on all these guys
> and review the possibility of not using it on the future.

Exim does not include any DNS list checks by default, so I have no idea
why you are ranting on exim-users about this. I don't see anything that
needs changing in Exim.


I think you should go and discuss your concerns on the newsgroup
news.admin.net-abuse.email. I'm sure you'll receive a sympathetic welcome.


Tim