OT: fighting rbl's

[Don Levey]

fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com wrote:
> On Die, 2004-11-30 at 14:38 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
>> I maintain mail servers and I use (free) services of black lists. If
>> your IP is listed, tough.
> 
> Tough for the users of your mail server. Tough if they seek another
> admin because of your incompetence.
> 
If this is an example of the civility you use when trying to resolve the issue, I'm not surprised that your requests have gone unanswered.

>> I'm also on dialup; I use my IAP's mail server to relay my outgoing
>> mail. 
> 
> Fine, don't forget to wink at the listening NSA/FBI/CIA/... guys from
> time to time.
> 
And you think that your communication would be completely unmonitored otherwise?  Did you install the hardwire between you and your destination yourself, or something?

>> Even aside from problems with blacklists, using your IAP's relay
>> makes sense if you have any volume of mail; your outgoings go
>> quickly to your IAP who then has to worry about deliveries which
>> _can_ take hours, days sometimes. 
> 
> Do you imagine your ISP to employ a lot of postmen trying to deliver
> your messages? Wake up, we live in the 21st century. The average
> desktop machine has hundreds of times more power than the system that
> brought people to the moon. I mostly don't care how long my messages
> wait in the queue, almost all are delivered on the first attempt
> anyway. 
> 
Which removes one concern from not smarthosting your mail - the ability to track down and/or otherwise control that portion of the delivery cycle.

>> Those black lists stop _a lot_ of spam. I get a few a day and dozens
>> a day <plonked>.
> 
> I do only get a few spams per moth, spamassassin eats the rest, but I
> am not blocking legitimate messages from going through. It's not spam
> that could kill e-mail, it's ignorant and busive admins like you!
> 
> Tom

I block somewhere around 60% of my incoming connections because they are spam.  They're on blocking lists, both off-site (SORBS, etc) and my own.  I can guarantee that they're spam.  How?  They're to addresses which were never meant to accept incoming mail.  My logs confirm it.  As far as I can tell, I've blocked 2 legitimate messages in the past three years based upon these criteria.  Obviously, YMMV.  At one point I was blocking over 10,000 messages a day from dynamic IPs on cable modems.  Their ranges weren't otherwise listed, and it took their providers in excess of three weeks to address the problem.

But one thing I don't understand: why do you feel you have any expectation to absolute privacy via email, especially when you're also demanding 100% deliverability?

 -Don