On Thu, 27 Jun 2002, Dallas Engelken wrote: > There can never be justification for blocking the entire netblock that > is that large.
There's frequently not justification for blocking any other netblock, either. You have to choose which blacklists have sane administrators, and hope that others are intelligent enough to do the same. Blacklisting isn't, and never has been, a good solution to spamming. It's sort of an OK approach to problems like open relays that allow innocent third parties to become spam hosts, but not for stopping spammers directly. Yes, it gets some ISPs to boot spammers off their netblocks. Guess what? Those spammers just go elsewhere and start again. When we first signed up with our current ISP, the NOC director told us stories about people who lied about what their business was, moved in thousands of dollars worth of hardware and used it to send spam, then simply abandoned it when the ISP shut down their net access because of blacklisting. By the time those IPs got blacklisted, they'd already set up at another ISP halfway across the country; their stream of spam wasn't even slowed. Ironically, only the really obnoxious large-scale spammers -- the ones the blacklisters would most like to shut down -- are able to afford this kind of hit-and-run tactic. What do they care if the ISP has a "zero- tolerance" spam policy? They're planning to default on their contract anyway. Meanwhile, businesses who are trying to do the right thing by having a stable net presence are excessively penalized. (I'm a bit sensitive about this right now as I just discovered that the entire block of IPs that my new DSL provider uses, are in the DUL. And there is no other DSL provider in this area, the last alternative is in bankruptcy as of a few weeks ago.) ------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored by: ThinkGeek at http://www.ThinkGeek.com/ _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
