On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote: > I see your point, but the _theory_ is not there. An RBL is meant to work > this way: How things are "meant" to work and how things are "used" are often different. Ever take out a screw with the blade of a sissors or pound a nail with the butt of a screwdriver? > * Someone reports your server as an open relay or spamhaus > * They test your site > * They blacklist you > * You report it fixed > * They test your site > * The clear you from the list IF they would do that soley on a domain name it *may* work. If they are doing it on an IP basis it won't since my IP address will change over time. > In theory, not a bad concept. However, it is in practice that it falls flat > on its face sometimes. As I mentioned in another message, sometimes it's > not the list that blocks you but other server admins who see patterns and > don't have the fine-grained control of some tools to attack it granularly. > My partner, for example, went after that particular problem with a > large-gauge shotgun, and I still don't know enough about spamassassin to > remove her blocks (and I promised not to remove her system until I had a > better one). Yes, the autocratic all IP addresses in China (for example) are evil. > DUL lists are based on the fact that no one should/does really operate a > mail server on a 56Kbps analog dialup line; hence, anyone who does is > deliberately skirting their ISP's mail server (to which they already have > access, else how do they receive mail?). So large amounts of mail or SMTP > connections from dialup points are highly probably spam. Again, not a bad > theory, but address ranges change, or people block the wrong ranges, or > they block ranges that are too big, or whatever; so again in practice the > thing falls down. DUL lists are even more "stupid" since I doubt that there is an effective manner to determine with any accuracy what IP address in Boreno (for example) are part of a DHCP group assigned to dialup lines. Unless, of course, one takes the view that they've never heard of Boreno so it must be a poor country and thus all they have are dialups > Neither type of list is meant to be generic, or to lump people together, or > to generalize. However, those things can and do happen. Must improve our > anti-spam methods, I guess. Again, intention v.s. application Ed -- http://webcams.greshko.com/ Do you know this man, Peter Boeni? http://www.shorewall.net/ for all your firewall needs -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
