Re: Tools: Getting off a blacklist?

["Gary S. Callison" <huey -at- interaccess -dot- com>]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca (Geoff Hart) wrote:
> 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. 

They really do need to clean up their act. 
http://www.mail-abuse.org/cgi-bin/show_listing.cgi?743444
http://www.marstar.ca/videotron.htm

> 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.

It's a small organization, but if you'd read their webpage, you'd have
seen the phone number. (ObTechWriting: MAPS also maintains perhaps the
only comprehensive list of documentation for securing mailservers
against insecure relaying at <http://www.mail-abuse.org/tsi/>)
I would strongly advise you not to waste your time calling them, however,
as Videotron does not appear to have done anything to fix the problem,
and are likely to remain listed.

> Needless to say, spammers aren't particularly inconvenienced by 
> Mail-Abuse--certainly, my volume of spam is only increasing.

DNSBLs are a powerful tool to stop spam; the very listing that you are
complaining about is stopping all of the spam coming from videotron to 
anyone subscribing to the MAPS service. The fact that your volume of
spam is only increasing means only that videotron is doing little to stop
spam from coming into their network. This is hardly suprising, considering
that they're apparently not doing much to stop it from coming out of
their network either. It sounds like a very convincing arguement to
find a different provider.

> 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?

I fail to see that you have any grounds to complain. The internet is a
cooperative venture, and email travels from place to place entirely at the
pleasure of those who own and operate the wires and servers in between.
No one is obligated to accept mail from anyone else, and many people have
decided to accept MAPS's recommendations on whose mail is likely to be
spam, and implement those recommendations as mail blocks. 

I note that MAPS isn't Videotron's only problem: that out-MX is also
listed in at least 25 other public DNSBLs (see http://moensted.dk/spam/
for more details) and no doubt countless private ones as well. If they
have a real interest in remaining part of the internet, they need to
figure out how all of that spam is getting through their systems, and put
a stop to it. 

Unless someone cares to volunteer to help write documentation for the
anti-spam movement, this is probably all painfully off-topic for TECHWR-L,
and I would suggest moving this discussion to the usenet newsgroup
news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting. 

-- 
Huey