(OT) anti-spam blocking

[Bill Vermillion]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 04:40:35PM -0700, Bill Campbell thus
spoke:

> I got another message forwarded to me today saying that
> somebody can't send to filepro-list at celestial.com because their
> ISP is being blocked for spamming, and to please unblock them
> (Comcast in this case). Checking the IP in question turned up
> the usual amount of spam to ancient spamtrap addresses which
> are what caused the blocks to be added.

> The simple solution to this is to send messages directly to the
> system running Mailman at filepro-list at lists.celestial.com.
> This machine doesn't have our most draconian anti-spam blocks
> in place. This server uses only major DNSRBLS including a
> couple from spamhaus.org.

> Be aware that if your e-mail server doesn't have any reverse
> DNS (rDNS) configured, it will be rejected. Configuring rDNS is
> absolutely basic, and any ISP that doesn't do it is going to
> have serious problems.

Then there are the clients who are anal enough they want to control
their own mail, run on a commercial DSL but don't want to pay to
have their domain name reversed to that IP.  I haven't had to point
out that to anyone for almost 18 hours :-(

And there are so many places providing IP which isn't their main
businesses.  These are typically the CLEC's that sell telephone
services and T1 for voice, and the convince the customer that since
they have the T1 they can save money by getting IP on the same
line.

Last customer we had that did that started complaining about mail
being slow and I saw congestion at the CLEC site with 450ms delay
on packets.

The dot-bomb event of 2000 didn't clear out enough of the
know-nothing ISPs IMO.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com