Blackmail In Cyberspace

Let me give you two examples of how to handle spam emails, one good, one not so good.

Firstly Comcast. We recently took over a site, the previous owners emailed the members (get that, members who had signed up of their own volition) to tell them that we were the new owners. One of the recipients was on Comcast and their email bounced, the failure report saying that their server thought we were spamming them. I emailed Comcast and within two hours they had unblocked us, no quibble, nothing. A simple explanation from us and the problem was resolved.

Now, the blackmail. SORBS (if you’re not aware of it) is a system that blocks spam email by blacklisting IP addresses. If at some point in the past (the IPs do expire if they’re not reported in a certain length of time) your mail server’s IP sent spam then all organisations subscribing to SORBS will reject your emails. Even though it wasn’t you who sent it. Good huh! And how do you get yourself removed from the list … you send them $50, yes this is used for charitable (predominantly anti-spam) causes, but surely that should be optional?

SORBS is an ill-conceived system and shouldn’t be used, except in concert with other ant-spam measures. Rejecting an email based purely on SORBS is wrong. It penalises well behaved organisations for sharing servers (unwittingly) with bad ones. It’s just plain stupid as it doesn’t fully take into account shared Ips.

Spam is a blight on the Internet and needs to be tackled by prosecuting spammers to the fullest extent of the law, but relying on SORBS to sort it out is like trying to stop a truck by driving another truck at it. There is no good outcome.

~ by alexsuze on February 15, 2008.