Steve Atkins wrote:
At which point if an opm admin added an IP address to the list,
mail was blocked. If they removed the IP address, mail stopped being
blocked.
The operator of an email blacklist can cause email to be blocked
by a direct action of theirs.
But only so long as the MTA admin, enduser, or intermediary using the
DNSBL, continues to use us. I had an experience with Google's Gmail
servers roughly a year ago where the GMail servers were being used to
propagate advertisements for a child porn site. After several hours
attempting to contact GMail's postmasters via e-mail, friends who knew
Google employees from Summer of Code, and calling their corporate
operator trying to get someone in GMail abuse, I gave up, and RHSBL
listed gmail.com, and added the individual IP's that sent this spam to
the DNSBL. I had several of our users e-mail us asking us if we were
out of our minds to list GMail, I replied with samples of the CP spam
we'd gotten from GMail. Some of these users stopped using the AHBL
because of this.
I think this scenario is apropos here for several reasons. One: none of
these blocks were intended to cause "collateral damage". I listed a
domain where I had almost 2 dozen spam sources for child porn, and the
domain used to spamvertise the child porn. I say that this didn't cause
collateral damage because what was blocked was the source of spam, and
the source of spam alone. No reasonable person however will look at
this and say that ham was blocked because of this.
Also this is a situation which disproves the concept that blacklists
block e-mail. Our ability to block e-mail begins and ends on the user
of our list's server. We have no ability to dictate what the user does
with our list, or when the user enables, or disables filtering based on
our list. It even stands to reason that there are users out there who
so detest DNSBL's that they whitelist based on our content. One must of
course accept this, and move on.
For those that are curious, one of my volunteers did get ahold of a SoC
volunteer who got her to an exec at Google, and then to an abuse role at
Gmail to stop the CP spam. Approximately 17 hours after I placed the
initial blocks they were removed.
Andrew
AHBL.org
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