On Sat, 2009-10-17 at 07:26 -0400, Aaron Wolfe wrote: > On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 5:47 AM, rich...@buzzhost.co.uk > <rich...@buzzhost.co.uk> wrote: > > On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 13:29 -0700, John Hardin wrote: > >> On Fri, 16 Oct 2009, John Rudd wrote: > >> > >> > Me. I work for one of their clients (a University). One or two of > >> > our divisions use them for large mailings to our internal users. > >> > >> How is Constant Contact better than (say) GNU mailman for that purpose? > > > > It's so you can pay someone to send spam, skip past lots of things like > > Barracuda Network$$$ devices and other filters and not have to face the > > music and termination from your provider for spamming. > > > > Constant Contact = Constant Spam. A IPTables dropping all of their > > ranges from SYN is a great way to cut *lots* of crap mail > > > > > > For a personal server, I'd agree they send nothing I want to receive. > > However, for anything more, I think you will get complaints. Constant > Contact is one of the "better" ESPs, kind of like a kick in the shin > is "better" than a kick in the teeth. They do have some legitimate > customers, and they do have some spamming customers. The truth is not > so good as Tara would like it to be, and not so bad as some have > claimed. Tara is very good at 'reputation management' and getting into bed with all the right people. She pops up in Spam lists, NANAE and other places to tell people just how positive CC are on dealing with abuse. Of course it's all spin - their core revenue is to help to deliver bulk mail that would normally be blocked on reputation based RBL's. Remember, if the sender was really clean, their would be zero need for CC.
I won't go into the nuts and bolts of it, but I've been giving 550 'no such user' and '550 blocked' messages to CC on a honeypot domain. Still they keep knocking.... > > What I really can't understand is why they are on any kind of > whitelist. Putting this type of company on a whitelist is great if > you're trying to support their revenue model.. now they can tell their > clients to use their service because they are on whitelists, this is > very attractive to spammers. But what good does it do for anyone > else? Why not let their messages meet the same scrutiny as any other > potential source of spam? If they get blacklisted, great, now their > revenue model is hurt until they find ways to avoid it. If they > manage to stay off the lists, even better, they are running as spam > free as they claim to be. Why are we covering for their mistakes and > supporting a company that profits from sending spam, even if its only > sometimes, by whitelisting them? Whitelisting them is a total travesty and the only reason for it has to be money or favours changing hands. It's really that simple. They appear on the Barracuda Whitelist and there has been some suggestion, albeit uncited, that Baraspammer Micheal Perone has some kind of 'interest' in them. I'm not sure of the status of whitelisting elsewhere for Constant Spamcrap anywhere else, but as it's being discussed here - I'm guessing somewhere in SA something is 'greasing the wheels' for them. The crux is this - they emit a constant stream of trash that would be rightly blocked if it were not whitelisted - so whitelisting them is clearly not appropriate at all for anyone interested in blocking spam. Still, what you will now see is Tara and friends go into meltdown stating they take spam seriously and request 'off list' resolution.
