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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: SORBS Contact
[email protected] wrote: >>> I don't know what your problem is, but you're not making things any >>> better by refusing to fix listings that aren't incorrect or, in some >>> cases, never were. > > IMHO, it's not about making things 'better' - we don't expect > NANOG'ers to be any more altruistic than other folk. It's > about consumer protection, as the anti-spammers always say; > if $BLACKLIST does a good job, we keep it. If it screws up > too much, we go elsewhere. So Matt has an incentive to be > correct, I should think. I fear we're veering off topic, but the problem with the "If $BLACKLIST does a job, we'll keep using it" axiom is that it makes the assumption that the majority of mail admins who use blacklists as part of their antispam arsenal are keeping close tabs on the efficacy and accuracy of the blacklists they use. Unfortunately I don't believe that is generally the case. In my experience, most use blacklists as a "set and forget" kind of weapon, and the only method they use to judge the reliability of a list is how many spams it blocks, regardless of accuracy. Too often you find admins that, when presented with an example of a false-positive caused by an inaccurate blacklist, cop the, "Don't talk to me, talk to the blacklist operators" attitude. And it isn't entirely a lazy admin problem. There really seems to be no *good* way to judge the relative accuracy of different blacklists. You can read thier policies and procedures, but how do you know if they actually follow them? Keeping an eye on mailing lists and newsgroups can help some, but how do you separate the net.kooks complaining about a valid listing from people with legitimate gripes? Especially when the blacklist admins often come off as bigger net.kooks than their detractors? It winds up looking like a big catch-22 to me. Blacklist operators essentially punt all responsibility for incorrectly blocked emails on the mail admins, and the mail admins punt all responsibility for incorrect listings back at the blacklist operators. And that leaves us with *no one* taking responsibility, which makes me seriously question the wisdom of using blacklists at all anymore. Personally, I think completely automated systems with very short listing times may be the way to go. It removes the human element from the listing and delisting process in order to avoid the personality-conflict/vendetta listings that seem to poison a number of popular blacklists. In the long run, though, I think the spammers have won the DNS blacklist war already and our time is better spent developing better content filters to worry with the actual content of the email than where it came from. Andrew Cruse
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