[Gambas-user] The Gambas Mascot/IDE

[Rob Kudla]

On Wed January 25 2006 07:56, Christopher Brian Jack wrote:
> I wonder if your provider knows they are on a spam blacklist
> or does your provider believe spam to be the best thing that
> happened to the internet (and thus won't deal with the issue)?

Spam blacklists haven't been about actually blocking spam for a 
long time; they're about net politics and power now.  

One of your customers misconfigures his mail server and leaves it 
open for spammers, whether or not it ever actually gets used for 
spam, or a bunch of your users get the latest Windows worm of 
the week and turn into spam zombies.... they blacklist your 
entire netblock and you have to donate to the legal defense fund 
of a guy getting sued by a spammer (which they refer to as "a 
charity") in order to have it removed.... eventually.  The only 
reason it's not extortion is that ISP's who use the blacklists 
are doing so voluntarily.

My company used to use blacklists to control spam in combination 
with Spamassassin, but there were so many false positives 
resulting in rejected good mail that we ended up outsourcing it 
to a local guy who maintains his own, more selective blacklists 
and does heuristic scanning and other stuff (also in addition to 
SA.)  Just having filters set up to block mail automatically for 
24 hours when you get spam originating from a particular IP will 
block the vast majority of spam that the blacklists would have 
caught, while greatly reducing the false positives.  

But there are a lot of people running email servers nowadays 
whose administration experience consists of "Exchange for 
Dummies", and they don't know any better.  Those admins, plus 
the ones who care more about not getting spam than about getting 
real email through to their users, are who keep the blacklists 
in business.

Rob