Don't use a cannon to kill a fly
We all hate spam, me no less than others.. but seriously.. can we do something about this ridiculous method of blacklisting entire IP-blocks whether they belong to a guilty party or not just to get even with an ISP that is presumably hosting spammers?
dslreports.com a website that openly fights against spam.. blacklisted by spews as part of the entire IP-block.. and of course there is no chance of removal.. just a several hundred word rant... not instructions (although you would think from the link...). Thanks for wasting 15 minutes of my life reading that. I know what spam is and I know why it's bad.. we don't spam.. and moving ISPs is not an option.. so essentially spews is blacklisting us for.. what again?
This isn't solving a problem, spammers will not use a blacklisted host and don't care about the carnage they leave behind as they hop from ISP to ISP.
Comments
Hmmm. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I mean, if other customers on the same ISP are spamming, then this is a pretty good move on the part of SPEWS. One of two things happen really - either the customers bitch at the ISP until the spammer is kicked off (which is good), or the customers keep leaving the ISP. Which is also good, since the ISP is supporting spam.
How come switching ISPs isn't an option? Have you talked to your ISP about the blacklisting?
Posted by: Luke | January 20, 2004 12:17 AM
I don't know what the answer is, but please don't stay up until 2 am looking for it. Life is too short to mess with this nonsense...
Posted by: paul | January 20, 2004 12:29 AM
Yeah, SPEWS fucking sucks (and is always blacklisting major websites for this stupid reason), and it's only a matter of time before other sysadmins finally realize that SPEWS is NOT the answer and that they should move towards something like Spamassassin.
Also, to further your "fly with a cannon" analogy, the irony is that you end up knocking a hole in the wall but you usually miss the fly.
Posted by: fluffy | January 20, 2004 12:54 AM
Yeah, tell me about it..I wrote on it a long time ago..
These lists have too much power as it is, and obviously these some of these people are too damn trigger happy. They aren't helping the situation any, but just making some blacklists a big no-no for serious admins out there.
Posted by: david | January 20, 2004 01:15 AM
worse yet, you have any experience getting off of Spamcop? This is a blacklist that states on their site, this list is for experimental purposes only, it should not be used in a production environment.
The way they work, is they take submissions from anyone, and obviously don't look real close at them. The company I work for regularly sends out notices of webinars to people who have expressed interest in them at trade shows. Some of these people evidentaly later decide they don't want this information but don't bother telling us to please stop sending it (I'm one of the email admins, we do take you off if you ask, and we don't buy email lists from anyone, these are a legitimate from trade shows). so they report us to SpamCop. We had 1 point where 2 people complained to spamcop in 1 day, 2 people out of literally thousands of emails. So SpamCop blacklists us.
That's when we found out exactly how many companies ignore SpamCops disclaimer and use it in a production environment.
Posted by: Jeff | January 20, 2004 01:27 PM
We made it into a front-page article (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/37511) in hopes that we can get enough attention and either get this listing taken off or fewer admins using spews to filter against.
SpamCop blacklisted as a few times in a smiliar way (someone asked for emails then claimed it was spam) but they always delisted us within a day or two of our disproving it.
Posted by: kasia | January 20, 2004 02:41 PM
SPEWS is dictating how ISPs do business. Once you're in their database, and you will definetely be in their database if you are hosting more than 10 people, then you're pretty much out of luck.
You might not be hosting the spammers themselves. Their DNS records might be on your server, or some stupid shit like that.
Now we all do hate spam, and rightfully so. But who gives a bunch of anonymous assholes the right to dictate what people can and can't do?
I actually know the answer to this. If they're that bad, then people should stop using their filtering service, which I think is the right way to go. However, that means a lot of people should be educated about why SPEWS is bad, whey the SPEWS people are assholes, and what alternetive services there are.
Is there an ANTI-SPEWS organization yet?
Oktay Altunergil
Posted by: Oktay Altunergil | January 21, 2004 11:51 AM
According to GoDaddy http://www.anti-spews.org/ is still available...;-)
Anyways it appears the SPEWS fanatics are hell bent on this whole anti-NAC, SPEWS is God thing. So the best method is probably to work on stopping people from using SPEWS to render them ineffective.
As far as regular people reporting legit e-mail as SPAM, I think it happens a lot. People "learn" about SPAM, and to never hit unsubscribe as they'll just get more, and rather than using their brains to determine real spam from fake spam, any unwanted e-mail becomes spam and is sent to the complaint department even if the person signed up for it before but was too lazy to read the overly verbose legal and privacy agreements that accompany most web sign-ups...
Posted by: Techie2000 | January 21, 2004 02:08 PM
Lots of ISPs have a lot more than 10 customers and aren't listed in SPEWS. That's because they don't have spammers as customers (for about 10 minutes after the first compaint, maybe, if they accidentally get one).
Nor does SPEWS dictate anything. It publishes a list. Other sites choose whether or not to use that list, and how to use it if they do. Do you have a problem with those you disagree with having freedom of speech?
Posted by: Seth | January 22, 2004 12:40 AM
lame.
NS
Posted by: Nikolay G. Shulga | January 22, 2004 01:13 PM
Company pays for mailserver.
Company blocks mail from spam friendly
ISP via SPEWS.
If any company wants to block mail from
a spam friendly ISP..why not?
They own the MX record and the servers.
Posted by: Blake | January 22, 2004 11:19 PM
SpamCop is police, judge and executioner.
That's not a democracy, that's a dictatorship.
They rely on "snitches", moles they call them,
that are unknown to those being blacklisted.
Many legitimate ISP and Corporations are listed
due to unfounded complaints by some real idiots.
Let's all work to get SpamCop removed from all
"backbone" servers. Put them out of business.
Posted by: bob smith | February 3, 2004 02:23 PM