[NCLUG] SpamAssassin Testimonials?

[J. Paul Reed]

On 24 Jul 2003 at 03:13:08, Sean Reifschneider arranged the bits on my disk to say:

> On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 12:12:08AM -0700, J. Paul Reed wrote:
> >and they're really *not* friendly to spammers. They just assume you're one
> >of the spammer's underlings or something.  In these cases, you're just
> >screwed and there's no way around it. 
> 
> Sure there are things you can do about it.  If you're he.net and you
> haven't set up a relay that's outside that block for your users to go
> through, you're part of the problem.  

What if overzealous RBLs put every single block an ISP owns on its list?
What then?

And he.net (for instance) doesn't do this; they give you a wire and let
packets dribble out of it. They don't provide mail servers or anything else
for their colocation customers. And I'd be interested if you could find an
Tier-1 ISP that did that for its customers who were on an overzealous RBL. 

> I'm not familiar with he.net's problem, but the ones I've heard of were
> with ISPs getting blocked that really DID seem to be spammer friendly,
> and would just move spammers around within their IP space to make a few
> bucks from these spammers.  There's one way to get their attention.

Yah, but it's just stupid when it's quite clear that they're *not* spammer
friendly; it's right there in their AUP (http://www.he.net/aup.html).

Of course, you can make the argument that that's only in there for warm
fuzzies, and he.net is out to make a buck. Maybe in the (non-)specific case
I'm thinking of, that was true, but I think it was just an error on
he.net's part in getting the account terminated quickly.

If you don't like that example, how about above.net null-routing one of the
other RBLs because above.net was running the MAPS RBL, and thought (but,
like SCO, couldn't and didn't want to prove anything) the other guys (in
Australia, I think it was) were infringing on a patent or a copyright or
something.

It's not quite the same, but my point is: RBLs require me to trust people
making decisions that may have financial and personal motivations for them,
and thus RBL politicking is not something *I'm* willing to subject my users
to.  If you're comfortable with that, great.

I was just bringing it up as something for others to think about.

Later,
Paul
------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. Paul Reed -- 0xDF8708F8 || preed at sigkill.com || web.sigkill.com/preed
To hold on to sanity too tight is insane.   -- Nick Falzone, Pushing Tin

I use PGP; you should use PGP too... if only to piss off John Ashcroft