[Gllug] RBL listed hosts

[Mark Lowes]

On Wed, 2002-06-12 at 17:13, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> On Wed 12 Jun, Xander D Harkness made the following spurious claims:
> > Do the large companies with RBL listed hosts ever get round to fixing 
> > them?  This is something that I have not been aware of; however I am 
> > sure with a few more servers on reject rather than warn they might be 
> > convinced :-)
> The whole idea of these lists is to provide encouragement for dodgy
> hosts to clean up their act.  The GOOD lists make every effort (yes,
> even snail mail and <gasp> the phone) to contact someone who can fix
> the problem before listing them.  Then they list them so their users
> scream that mail is being lost.

Though the only list I know of which does that is the MAPS RBL,
certainly the likes of bl.spamcop and ordb don't warn before listing.

[...]
> The biggest problem is that the bounce messages people receive at most
> have a line saying "Rejected due to message content."  While the idea
> of actually allowing delivery of the email might seem a bad idea,
> accepting the message and then constructing a helpful error message
> would make these blacklists a LOT more effective.

Though one of the problems there is you let the spam into the server and
generally spam is unbouncable because the address is either bogus or a
hijacked domain (and therefore bouncing back to the domain owner is just
continuing the abuse).  Many server admins would prefer to reject at
smtp time to lower the load on their boxes and keep the queues clean.

   Mark


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