Re: Spam in the lists out of control
On Wed, 12 May 2004, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 11:37:41AM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 May 2004, Branden Robinson wrote:
> >
> > > My home box is on all kind of blacklists despite the fact that my IP
> > > address hasn't changed in over a year. In my experience, blacklist
> > > maintainers really do not give a shit about collateral damage. It's
> > > just not important to them.
> >
> > If your IP has not really changed in over a year, then there should be
> > at least one kind of blacklist on which your home box should not be,
> > namely, those who list open proxies, like list.dsbl.org or cbl.abuseat.org.
> >
> > Removing one's machine from list.dsbl.org is easy. Removing it from
> > cbl.abuseat.org is completely trivial.
>
> That's hardly the point; you shouldn't be on that blacklist in the first
> place. If there were just one blacklist on the Internet, making sure you
> stay off that list wouldn't be a problem.
Agreed.
> As it is, there's a fairly large number of blacklists, each with
> different policies for putting IP addresses on it or for removing
> them;
Yes, but in practice there are not so many of them. You just have to
consider the ones which are actually used.
> and it's often not even possible to find out exactly where you're
> blacklisted this time without contacting the admin (which, of
> course, isn't possible since you're blacklisted).
Hmm, I wonder if you really know how a blacklist usually operates.
If your mail is rejected because of a blacklist, the rejection message
usually tells you the list in which you are. If you want to see your
status before sending a message, there are URLs like this one:
http://openrbl.org
which allow you to do a general search.
In either case you don't want to be out of *every* blacklist, you just
need to be out of the lists actually used by the people you want to
communicate. The more used a list is, the more interesting it
will be for you to be out of it.
A DNSBL is just a list of IP addresses. I can create a list which
contains the even IP numbers, but since nobody would use it to reject
real email in a real production environment, you would not have to
worry about your IP being "listed".
Those list that "work", i.e. those who catch a lot of spam and have
very few false positives, will be used by many people. Those who do
not "work" (too many false positives), will not be used by many people.
So, in practice, there are not so many lists to worry about.
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