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Re: How I deal with (false positive) IP-address blacklists...

2008-12-10 15:31:15
Paul Hoffman wrote:
At 11:57 AM -0500 12/10/08, Theodore Tso wrote:
The point I was trying to make is that there seems to be an inherent
assumption by some people, perhaps because the people who make these
assumptions run large mail servers, that the problem with someone who
is wrongly blocked rests solely with the sender, and not with the
utimate recipient, or with the mailer operator.

"seems" ... "perhaps" ...

I know of no one on this list who makes those assumptions. In my
discussions with people who "run large mail servers", none of them have
made that assumption.

My experiences are similar to Ted's.

They may not realize that they're making such assumptions.  But such
assumptions are implicit in the notion that the sender should jump
through some additional hoop in order to get his name off of a blacklist
or to get his mail accepted.

(One hoop that I was recently asked to jump through was to change the
PTR record for the source address of my outgoing mail server so that it
contained a label of the form "mail" or "mx#".)

The emphaiss on operators of "large mail servers" may be missing the
point.  A significant amount of mail is not sent via "large mail
servers". And I don't think that many of us want effective email to be
limited to "large mail servers".

And maybe there are some good guys out there who don't expect senders
(or their mail systems) to jump through arbitrary hoops in order to get
mail through.  But unless there are clear and effective guidelines for
what all operators should do regarding spam (and most operators follow
them), mail will continue to be unreliable.   Simply saying "use a
trustworthy blacklist" is not sufficient - it's just deferring the
problem to a third party with even less accountability to the endpoints
and less transparency.

Keith
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