Well, I see Terry is _still_ using SORBS, despite knowledge that it is a
revenge list. I guess that's his choice. But it raises the question of
whether his interest in anti-spam is genuine. You can't associate with
Court-proven liars using anti-spam for vendettas and remain credible.
So, I'm just going to point out a few things. These are mostly things that
I've been thinking about recently, relative to abusive blacklists and
such.
As the Judge said about Alan Brown and ORBS:
http://www.iadl.org/ab/AB-Defamation-Domainz.html
Indeed, the very same Alan Brown originated the claims that our IP
addresses were hijacked on spam-l. This was picked up by Matthew Sullivan
of SORBS. Paul Vixie is also discreditably associated with SORBS: he
offered them "bulletproof" hosting after SORBS was booted from XO for AUP
violations for the defamation of Av8 Internet and for threatening "mail
bombing" (IE spamming). In another irony, Vixie doesn't have an AUP. (its
ironic because Vixie demands that everyone have AUPs and enforce them.
Except Vixie. And he has no problem associating with "mail bombers". Hmm.)
Once you really dig into the spam problem, or rather the anti-spam
community (certain parts anyway), its very frequently about vendetta's and
privateering. One wonders who the spammers really are**. There are
precious few people who are actually genuinely interested in spam problems
and those people don't associate with the fakes and abusers.
Anyway, most people don't want anything to do with SORBS after they find
out about SORBS, and look up our listing. And few people use SORBS:
Rarely a message blocked despite their attempt at blocking all of a /16
and all of a /21. That's a lot of mail to try to interfere with. Only the
(temporarily) misled and the Brown/Sullivan/Vixie crowd use it. Well,
Terry clearly has his eyes open about SORBS, and chooses to associate with
the disingenuous, the liars*** (Court-proven even), and the dishonest,
people who aren't really interested in spam problems. The people who are
genuinely interested, don't associate with fakes.
--Dean
**The real spammers seem to mostly comply with CAN-SPAM. So who are the
ones who don't comply with CAN-SPAM? Recall that CAN-SPAM doesn't ban
spam, in fact, it explicitly legalizes spam, so long as spammers comply
with certain practices. The DMA pushed it through, and its essentially the
same as the IEMCC proposal. The spammers love it. The anti-spam community
mostly hates it. But a lot of junk in my emailbox doesn't even comply at
all. "Could it be ", (said in my best
'Michael-Moore-in-George-Bush-school-scene' voice), "that anti-spammers
are sending this non-commercial, non-compliant spam, just like they abused
open relays? Damn. It was them." One wonders who the criminally
CAN-SPAM non-compliant really are.
*** Nick Nicholas (former executive director of MAPS) wrote a manifesto
about "The Truth through Lies"
http://home.pacbell.net/nicnic/johnson.html
Nicholas writes "Johnson's fictional treatment of this historical event
suggests that, paradoxically, the road to truth is paved with lies." Uh
huh. Right. But it explains a lot about that crowd.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 22:19:42 -0500
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON(_at_)cirrus(_dot_)av8(_dot_)net>
To: dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details
The original message was received at Thu, 27 Jan 2005 22:19:37 -0500
from sr22.av8.net [198.3.136.5]
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<terry(_at_)ashtonwoodshomes(_dot_)com>
(reason: 553 5.3.0 <terry(_at_)ashtonwoodshomes(_dot_)com>... Message from
130.105.36.66 rejected - see http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/cgi-bin/lookup?IP=
130.105.36.66)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mail.ashtonwoodshomes.com.:
DATA
<<< 553 5.3.0 <terry(_at_)ashtonwoodshomes(_dot_)com>... Message from
130.105.36.66 rejected - see http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/cgi-bin/lookup?IP=
130.105.36.66
550 5.1.1 <terry(_at_)ashtonwoodshomes(_dot_)com>... User unknown
<<< 503 5.0.0 Need RCPT (recipient)