OT: fighting rbl's

[John Summerfield]

On Wednesday 01 December 2004 04:20, Thomas Zehetbauer wrote:
> On Die, 2004-11-30 at 14:38 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
> > I maintain mail servers and I use (free) services of black lists. If your
> > IP is listed, tough.
>
> Tough for the users of your mail server. Tough if they seek another
> admin because of your incompetence.

They are perfectly happy with the arrangement:-)
>
> > I'm also on dialup; I use my IAP's mail server to relay my outgoing mail.
>
> Fine, don't forget to wink at the listening NSA/FBI/CIA/... guys from
> time to time.
<Shrug>
I'm not involved in any criminal behaviour. If they want to waste their 
efforts monitoring friendly foreign countries' citizens.... Not forgetting 
the scandal when they're caught.

>
> > Even aside from problems with blacklists, using your IAP's relay makes
> > sense if you have any volume of mail; your outgoings go quickly to your
> > IAP who then has to worry about deliveries which _can_ take hours, days
> > sometimes.
>
> Do you imagine your ISP to employ a lot of postmen trying to deliver
> your messages? 

Nah. That's what MTAs do. But, it costs bandwidth and time to do.

> Wake up, we live in the 21st century. The average desktop 
> machine has hundreds of times more power than the system that brought
> people to the moon. I mostly don't care how long my messages wait in the
> queue, almost all are delivered on the first attempt anyway.

The average desktop system's not running software with the nous to do the job 
properly, and isn't connected enough hours to handle difficult mail anyway.

>
> > Those black lists stop _a lot_ of spam. I get a few a day and dozens a
> > day <plonked>.
>
> I do only get a few spams per moth, spamassassin eats the rest, but I am
> not blocking legitimate messages from going through. It's not spam that
> could kill e-mail, it's ignorant and busive admins like you!

Tut tut.

I check my logs from time to time. I see lots of mail to my spambait addresses 
being plonked because it comes from  blocked address. I've not noticed any 
legit mail getting dropped.

If you want to send me mail, you gotta meet my rules. These include approval 
by my blacklist providers.

Also you gotta pass my header checks. No funny East-asian character sets, we 
can't read them. I'll drop Russian and Greek when someone tries those.

Then Spamassassin gets a look. Everything to the spambait addresses that gets 
here is processed by spamassassing as known spam.





-- 

Cheers
John Summerfield
tourist pics: http://environmental.disaster.cds.merseine.nu/