Tools: Getting off a blacklist?

Subject: Tools: Getting off a blacklist?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com, CEL <copyediting-l -at- listserv -dot- indiana -dot- edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 17:44:31 -0500

For the past couple weeks, I've found that an increasing proportion of the mail I send from my service provider (Videotron.ca) is being rejected as spam by other service providers, most notably those used by colleagues in government and at universities. The one constant: each of their service providers subscribes to a blacklist service. The organization responsible for maintaining this particular blacklist is Mail-Abuse (http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/).

My ISP's tech support department claims they've already tried hard to be removed from the blacklist and have failed. Based on past experience, I give them about a 50% probability of being in the right and a 50% probability that they really do need to clean up their act. Meantime, the folks at Mail-Abuse seem to be entirely resistant to any criticism or pressure to change their approach--though I've yet to actually reach a human being at the company, so I can't even file a complaint about their holier-than-thou approach.

Needless to say, spammers aren't particularly inconvenienced by Mail-Abuse--certainly, my volume of spam is only increasing. My ISP isn't likely to change its tune; I'm sure they _have_ tried to fix the problem, even if they didn't try hard enough. I don't particularly want to vote with my wallet; I'm not sure I have any other options for a high-speed connection, since the only local alternative doesn't support OS-X on my computer.

More to the point, the folks at Mail-Abuse have gotten me seriously pissed, and I'd rather fight than switch at this point. What's to stop them from blacklisting my next ISP, then the next one, then the next? So here's my question: who does one complain to about these things? The FTC? The W3C?

--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)





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