On 01/28/2011 07:53 AM, Esa Laitinen wrote:
On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 4:23 PM, Michael Thomas <mike(_at_)mtcc(_dot_)com
<mailto:mike(_at_)mtcc(_dot_)com>> wrote:
>From what I've seen, they seem very asymmetric. Whereas acquiring
a bad reputation is automated, unacquiring a 'bad' reputation
seems to generally require human intervention, pleading, and in
some cases what
amount to bribes. Considering that many of these reputation
systems are hair triggered out of necessity, the amount of false
positives is bound to be pretty high. So how to get back out of a
blackhole is a whole lot
more arcane than falling into one.
True. This actually should motivate the mail senders to take care in
their e-mail hygiene so that they won't fall into that hole in the
first place. Not necessarily a bad thing, IMHO.
While mail hygiene is a good thing, you can get sucked into
blackholes for perfectly innocent reasons. The easiest is that
you inherit address space that was in a blackhole. Getting
out of the blackholes of the usual suspects isn't that hard,
but like i say it's definitely not automated and can be very
shady itself.
It doesn't really hurt much if somebody is in "Crazy Al's left-handers
block list": badly managed services will lose their users pretty quickly.
But not quickly enough. All it takes is a few clueless companies
or isp's to use badly run blackholes to make them a nuisance. Worst
of all, is when they claim you're on some blackhole but don't tell you
which one, and it's not one of the ones that the various blackhole
aggregator/test sites knows about. I've been having problems with
some Swiss ISP that does this.
But it's the whole process that lacks any standardization or best
common practices as far as I can tell. If you're a legitimate sender,
you really don't want to waste your time sending stuff that readers
don't want to see. But the feedback loop is either nonexistent, very
murky or hasn't scaled down to where medium to small (read: have
day jobs doing other things than email delivery) can wire them up.
It seems to me that improving that situation would dramatically
help the false positive rate as well as the problem of accidentally
falling into blackholes of the clueful blackhole operators.
Mike
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