Nitro
Bodhisattva
Joined: 08 Apr 2002
Posts: 661
Location: San Francisco
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 Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2002 2:57 am Post subject: [forums-announce] SPEWS RBL blacklisting |
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Recently the admins at SPEWS have taken the liberty of targeting some spammers on the same network which the Gentoo Forums server resides. Before anyone jumps to an immediately conclusion thinking that we are spamming (or our gracious ISP is, which in turn buys bandwidth from Cogentco), we are not. We are the victims of numerical proximity with spammers.
After I saw the first bounced email I thought, it shouldn't be too hard to get white listed. Took a peek at www.spews.org. I didn't see any formal email address or form to appeal our blacklisting. After reading the entire FAQ, near the bottom I found: | http://www.spews.org/faq.html wrote: | | Q42: My IP address/range is being listed by SPEWS but I'm not a spammer and I just signed up for this/these address(s). What can I do to be removed from the list? |
I'd share with you the entire answer, but basically it says that the only means of contact with the SPEWS admins is to post to a public news group (news.admin.net-abuse.email - Google). So, I take a peek at previous posts and find that the odds are really against us.
A prime example is this case The guy requesting removal is listed under the same abuse case number as us (#S1842). I don't see any error in his request. Read some replies and one person says | Quote: | | he's not listed. It's Cogentco. |
Excuse me? Okay, to push a provider to enforce its own policy is a noble cause in itself, but to shrug off the innocent victims is not acceptable.
How is it affecting us? New users that register accounts and set there mail server to a SPEWS filtered server, never recieve their activation email. I can manually activate it, and have done so for several users already. Users with watch threads also won't recieve updates, as well as notifications of private messages.
The solution? The best solution I see is to not say anything to the SPEWS admins (unless someone reading this has an inside connection  ) in an attempt to get whitelisted, for fear of being unecessarily flamed. Instead, we will relay all our mail to the primary Gentoo server (the server that runs www.gentoo.org, bugs.gentoo.org, and the mailing lists). Hopefully, I can talk to another to drobbins or kabau tonight or tomorrow and get the relaying through their server setup.
In the meantime, I suggest that anyone using SPEWS RBL should stop, or switch. For those of you that visit www.kernel.org you might recall reading this: | www.kernel.org wrote: | linux.kernel.org, our mailing list server, keeps getting listed in the SPEWS RBL due to numerical proximity with an alleged spammer. We have pointed this out to them on several occations, and they usually fix it -- but a couple of weeks later we find the same problem. For obvious reasons, we do not recommend that you use the SPEWS RBL or any site that derive from their information, including relays.osirusoft.com; see this page.
Please note that The Kernel Dot Org Organization do not endorse or support spam in any shape, way or form, and certainly do not recognize any sort of "right to spam." Spam is at the very least offensive and virtually always fraudulent, theft of service and invasion of privacy. We appreciate that it's a hard and thankless job to run after spammers, and appreciate the services that well-run RBL services provide.
Also please note that we are a small not-for-profit organization that is completely dependent on sponsorships and heavily limited by practical constraints; "just move to another ISP" is not a realistic option for us. |
I couldn't have said it better myself.
For those of you who are interested in the case, here is the evidence file: http://www.spews.org/html/S1842.html
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- Kyle Manna
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