zombie anti-spammers? fabulous

[rone]

Dear dr_strych9: please supplement my arguments against real-time blackhole lists with this delightful story about a blackhole list that came back to life fifteen months after its death and caused all its subscribers' incoming mail to bounce.

Comments

[motis.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago, I had a problem with e-mail from my server in China being classified by an RBL as spam. I run a private, by-invitation-only site that requires deliberate registration, and the only e-mail we send is to people who definitely want to receive it and have explicitly requested it. Our mail was being blocked because Spamhaus listed the entire data center where my server is co-located as a spam source. It's true, there were some spammers using servers in that data center... IIRC, two or three. But the data center is in China, where there is no option of putting your colo box in a different ISP's data center, and the people running the place were unable to read the RBL notices being sent to them in English, and had no idea what was going on. Hundreds of servers in that very large data center were potentially impacted (I say 'potentially' because surely some of them don't send out e-mail), and 99.99% of those servers were owned or rented by people who had nothing to do with any spam being sent to anyone.

If putting pressure on customers to use a different ISP's data center is the object, then this particular action was one of those EPIC FAILS we all know and love, because there aren't other ISPs in China to give your business to. What ended up happening in this situation is that I was personally forced to act as an intermediary between Spamhaus and the Chinese administrators at my data center in order to get my e-mail working again. Don't get me wrong, I hate spammers just as much as anyone (and given my capacity for hate, probably much more than most)... but I deeply resent having my innocent server's e-mail held hostage, and being forced to work for Spamhaus unpaid. Had they NOT blacklisted the entire data center and instead ASKED me to work unpaid in an effort to rid the place of spammers, I would have been more than happy to cooperate. As it is, I feel like I've been strongarmed. Spamhaus used me and deprived me of any choice in the matter, and I had absolutely nothing to do with any spam sent to anyone from anywhere. The whole thing, in my opinion, was high-handed, arrogant, imperious, and deeply abusive of a power that should not exist in the unregulated form that it currently enjoys. If they want to block domains or IPs that are known to be spam sources, so be it... but this whole business of putting pressure on data centers via their innocent customers stinks like a ripe pig carcass left in a moldy sauna for the weekend.