Re: Every spam is sacred
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 02:18:57AM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > They have said "no" using (more or less) the following reasoning:
> > Since Debian machines have been listed in several DNSBLs in the past,
> > we should not use ANY of them ourselves (which is like saying: since
> > we have sent tons of spam in the past via our mailing lists, we should
> > accept ALL the spam we receive). Does somebody understand this?
>
> How about, "because we have been unfairly listed as being spammers and
> had our mail blocked, even though we were innocent,
We were not so "innocent" back last year when
a) spam was 10% of all the mail in the lists.
b) we stripped all Received: headers, causing the mail to be seen as sent by
us, not by the spammers who sent posts to the lists (this is now fixed).
This caused us to be included in the spamcop blocking list, which use
a rather poor criteria to list IPs.
I'm *not* advocating for the use of the spamcop blocking list.
In which other DNSBL were we listed and why were we listed?
> we refuse to participate and endorse a system which in the past as
> been used to unfairly block innocents,
There is not such thing as "a system". Every DNSBL is a completely
different system and should be evaluated on their own merits.
There are ones which list individual IPs and there are others which
list entire ISPs. Just because there are some bad DNSBLs does not mean
all of them are bad.
> share netblocks with those whose political views were at odds from
> those who had run DNSBL's?"
Open relays, open proxies and insecure formmail scripts in the DSBL
are listed one by one, not in netblocks.
> Contenting filtering, I think is great. Delegating to someone else
> the power to say whether or not a very large number of people will see
> mail from a particular host or network, is more power than I at least
> personally am willing to delegate to someone else.
Those who want all their spam, including the one coming from open
relays, open proxies and such (I repeat that approximately 50% of all
the spam comes from such sources) may ask to be added to exim's
recipients_reject_except variable. Where is the problem?
> This is a philosophical issue, and I understand there are those who
> think that DNS blocking lists are wonderful. But I at least am glad
> that the Debian admins have chose to use an approach such as
> spamassassin, rather than DNS blacklists.
Again, there is no such thing as "DNS blocking lists are good" or "DNS
blocking lists are bad". Each DNSBL should be evaluated on their own
merits, and they should not be put on the same bag, since there are a
lot of differences between them.
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