[Gllug] Are some blocklists just a con?

Lucian lucian at lastdot.org
Thu Apr 21 19:45:39 UTC 2011


On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Martin A. Brooks
<martin at hinterlands.org> wrote:
> On Wed, April 20, 2011 23:06, Chris Bell wrote:
>> they had no idea why and did not recognise the name of the supposed
>> blocklist. The company itself has had several instances if being placed on
>> blocklists and then receiving demands for payment to clear the block. This
>> smells of a con trick. Any thoughts?
>
> A mail system administrator must choose to use such a list on their own
> systems.  I would view this as their problem, not yours.
>
> As you may know, I run a commercial antispam filtering service.  We use
> Spamhaus's paid-for data feed and, in my experience, it's not often that
> legitimate sending hosts get on the wrong list, and Spamhaus don't charge
> to make such corrections, and they do so in a very timely manner.
>
> We typically get about 25-30 database updates from them per day.

That's nice of them, to update the DB in a timely manner. Spamhaus
(imho) is one of the _extremely few_ lists "safe" to use. But this
lists idea can go very wrong, see the SORBS case, with big chunks of
IP space listed for years and for no reasons. In my experience they
too ask for money and it's clearly a scam of some sort. There are a
lot of scammers out there and the net if full of horror stories.
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