[Techtalk] sendmail/RBL question

Raven, corporate courtesan raven at oneeyedcrow.net
Thu Mar 28 19:19:55 EST 2002


Heya --

	I had to jump in on this one too.

Quoth Linda Laubenheimer (Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 02:29:40PM -0800):
> > 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:
> 
> "Story" is right...  This is the most inflammatory piece of propaganda 
> I've read in a long time.  Even Hollings and Disney don't lay it on 
> quite as thick.  The only thing missing is a reference to Hitler.  As it 
> is, they reference McVeigh, and "Sherman's march to the sea".

	That site is pretty loaded with rhetoric designed to evoke an
outraged response.

	Here's my take on blackhole lists in general.  Nobody is forcing
you to use them, or not use them.  There are a million different sites
with their own blackhole lists, ranging from "here there be confirmed
spammers, we've seen the headers of several spam messages from this
site, tested the site, and it's a spam machine | open relay" to "I don't
like this person so I'm blacklisting their IP".  Individual mailserver
admins choose whether to use those blackhole lists.  There's no
conspiracy to make you use them or not.  It's your choice.

	If your ISP uses a blackhole list, and you don't like their
policy, you can get another ISP.  There are some that don't blackhole
anything, catering to consumers that prefer that.  There are others that
filter heavily.  Find an ISP that fits your preferences, or run your own
mailserver tuned the way you like it.

	I tend to be conservative in my filtering for the domains I
admin at large, and stricter when it comes to filtering for my own
account.  But I'm not going to stick everyone who shares a domain with
me with the same spam-filtering preferences I have.

	There's no forcing of mailserver choice, either.  You can use
blacklists (or not, as you choose) with any of the major mail servers.
 
> Most of these people are those too lazy, incompetent, or unethical 
> to secure their open relays, which are what enable spammers to dump 
> tons of cr at p in your mailbox.  Then they get all unhappy when they 
> get RBL'd for being a spam-haven or spam enabler.  The legitimate 
> businesses don't stop to think that the spammers are stealing 
> resources from *them*, too (bandwidth is an expense, and spam eats 
> it), and plugging the hole can save them money.

	Not to mention that spammers up the costs for everyone else that
shares an ISP with them.  The stress that bulk mail puts on the network,
the man-hours of your Customer Service and Network Abuse tech who listen
to and respond to all the complaints -- all that costs money too.
Connectivity would be cheaper if spam was less of a problem.
(Admittedly, that's only one of a kazillion factors that affect the
proce of bandwidth.  But I think it's significant enough to mention.)

	Not being an open relay if you're a mail server admin is really
important.  It's not hard to turn on selective relaying for any
customers of yours that may need it, and you're a lot less likely to
have bulk-mailers using *your* resources and bandwidth to send out
their spam.
 
Cheers,
Raven	
 
"That should be: "If cryptography is outlawed, only bhgynjf jvyy unir
 pelcgb!" Or maybe, for maximum effect, "...only pvumbxt xjmm ibwf
 dszqup!""
 -- Kai, on 'better' cryptography

MD5 (outlaws) = 4c86ccf216da19edcc4b80e3824b67ab
 -- my response



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