[Techtalk] Over-zealous spam filtering (by Raven's ISP?)

[James]

On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Raven Brooke wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, James wrote:
> 
> > permanent, unless you contact them by snail-mail (not online) to object!
> 
> it wouldn't be very practical to expect them to email after we had blocked 
> their domain, and we certainly aren't going to provide known spammers with 
> a webform or other additional means to continue targeting us.

All the public blacklist projects provide an email address (exempted from 
the blacklist, for obvious reasons!) where server admins can query bans, 
and ask for a re-test.

> > (It's also pretty rude: "553 ##### YOU HAVE BEEN SHIT-LISTED **..." - 
> > hardly a helpful message to send other Net users!
> 
> I'm sorry if this offended you, but if you saw even a small percentage of 
> the "XXX These women will actually fsck animals! XXX" mails that caused us 
> to create the banned-for-spamming.us domain you might agree that this is a 
> very mild response.

Except it isn't sent to those who sent you the spam - it's sent to anyone 
using the same ISP as a spammer!

> > Among others, they have blocked ALL mail from: Chello, the largest cable
> > ISP in Holland; Rogers cable; CharterPipeline; *.co.jp;  Eudoramail.com;
> > GMX; the University of Waterloo, Canada; Wanadoo, France's broadband ISP -
> > with filters like that, does ANY mail get through?!
> 
> yup, all these offenders are guilty, guilty guilty of sending unsolicited 
> and sometimes highly offensive material to us and/or our friends, family 
> (including our teenage children) and the few others who share our 
> mailserver. They bring this stuff in our home once, we don't invite 'em 
> back.

NO. They are major ISPs, who had a *customer* who spammed you. There are 
literally millions of other users of those ISPs who have never spammed 
anybody in their lives, which is why I was rather surprised to get a 
message saying I was "shitlisted for spamming".

My own ISP, despite appearing on your "shit-list" for spamming, is very 
active in preventing its users from operating open-relays, open-proxies, 
spamming, DoSing etc; fire up a copy of CodeRed or NIMDA, and you are 
immediately shut off.

I'm also a little surprised you don't have any of the major US ISPs 
blocked, when they are rather more spam-tolerant than mine...


James.