[Techtalk] sendmail/RBL question

[Sunni Maravillosa]

Hi everyone,

I have a possibly confusing question, because in typical newbie
fashion, I may be confusing a couple of different things. First, some
background.

I'm on a couple of email discussion lists, and on one, spam
occasionally gets through the owner's filters and blocks. Someone on
the list has taken it upon himself to complain to the "spam police",
which has created lots of problems for the list owner. In short, now
many legitimate messages get bounced because of what he's done to try
to eliminate spam, and getting RBL'ed (Real Time Blacklisted, in case
anyone doesn't know).

I've been doing some researching on this, and found one site that makes
a claim that the sendmail program has RBL stuff built in. Here's the
text from the page, http://www.ifn.net/rblstory.htm:

"RBL's work is made easier by the complicity of two other
organizations.

"The first is 'sendmail.com', the commercial provider of the email
processing software that is
probably the most widely used by online providers, and the organization
it officially recognizes
to support its open distribution software, 'sendmail.org'. As their web
site will tell you, they are
intimately linked to RBL; their web site is, in fact, hosted by the
Internet Software Consortium,
which is listed at the same address as RBL itself, with Paul Vixie as
its technical contact. And
in the recent versions of 'sendmail', RBL intrusion capability is built
in. Coincidence? Maybe.
In any case, it means two things. First, it is software with someone
else's view of a desired
social order built into it. And second, when providers update their
software from time to time,
if they update 'sendmail' they may be enabling RBL, and thus block some
email to their
customers, without even realizing that it happened."

Okay, here's the question (actually, more than one): This is referring
to the sendmail program lots of Linux boxes have, right? So an open
source program has blocking stuff built in?

Assuming those answers are yes... Is there any way to avoid using
sendmail? Or can one disable the RBL capability of sendmail? 

Thanks,

Sunni --
Still waiting to get a tux-friendly modem, but learning all I can while
I wait...