http://maps.vix.com/rbl/
I have heard that the main writers of Imail are not interested in supporting this standard.
This has been around for a number of years and I and my customers would like to see it supported by Imail.
RBL is a free service. The only thing that is needed is support for it to be build into Imail and you to set it up in a 8.x version of Bind.
If you only knew the time and money that SPAM has cost us and our customers.
They call us up wanting to know if there is any thing we can do to stop the hundreds of emails that are going to them. And to have to tell them that the only thing we can do is to change there email account.
This is something that should be embraced whole heartily by IPSwitch and then let there customers decide if they what to use this or not.
The following Software and companies support RBL.
rblsmtpd
qmail
ZMailer
exim
smail 3.x
smtpd
Stalker Internet Mail Server for MacOS
Blackmail mail filter
JSMail
Mail Exchange 5.1 (on OpenVMS)
Eudora Internet Mail Server 2.2 beta 3
NTMail
Postfix (previously known as VMailer MTA)
SmallWorks has written a patch to allow TCP Wrappers (tcpd) to access the RBL. Visit their Anti-Spam Software page for information. Or, you can grab a local copy from here. Greg A. Woods has a later version of the patch at ftp://ftp.weird.com/pub/local/tcp_wrappers-rbl-patch, and adds that it is included in the contrib sub-directory of the latest smail beta (3.2.0.103).
SaberNet has published a patch to add RBL support to smap, the mail proxy from the TIS Firewall Toolkit.
Imail is a great email package and would be even greater if they included RBL.
Please if you would like to see this support build in email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and let's see if we can't change there minds.
****Note this is not a SPAM Message :)
Michael Willis
WebDance Networks
Columbus, Ohio
614-430-9065
Infor on the thinking behide RBL.
The MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System) RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) is a list of networks which are known to be friendly, or at least neutral, to spammers who use these networks either to originate or relay spam. As we discover such networks, we deny them access to the part of the Internet that we are paying for. Because our research into the attitudes and policies of network owners is hard to duplicate, many dozens of other network owners have asked for and are now receiving a real time mirror of our MAPS RBL.
Theft of Service
Irrespective of the laws of whatever land a spammer, or a spam victim, is in, we consider spam to be theft of service. Internet users do not pay their access fees for the purpose of being annoyed. None of us bought our computers or modems for the use of so-called advertisers. Since the original ARPAnet the written rules of the Internet community (see the Netiquette RFCs and their precursors from Usenet) have required that we each refrain from intentionally annoying other Internet citizens.
Culture of Openness
Internet technology is notably lacking in the kind of harsh, prescriptive, contractual, authorization based access controls which have been found in virtually all pre-Internet proprietary protocol suites. One assumption is that any host on the network should be allowed to send mail to any other host on the network, since mail will only be sent if it is expected to be of direct and equal benefit to the sender and recipient. Another assumption built into Internet's protocols is that mail should always be relayed if it is not on its final host, since this condition is not supposed to occur without the permission of the relay's operator.
Lying Conmen
Spammers, as with all confidence men, are experts in public relations. They would have us believe lies such as ``most Internet users are glad to receive unsolicited mass e-mail'' and ``the anti-spam community are a small number of reactionary hippies who are just anti-commerce.'' To some extent these lies succeed, since many Internet newcomers who were not here before the advent of spam believe that the Internet has always been this way. In fact, the anti-spam community is made up of users and technologists of all political backgrounds, all ages, and all levels of principle. There are a number of web pages which dispel the common lies of spammers, and you owe it to yourself to take a look at them.
Rights to Passage
No Internet user has any fundamental right to send you e-mail or any other kind of traffic. All information exchange on the Internet is consensual, and unless you opt into some advertising feed, the automatic presumption on the part of all Internet users is that you would be annoyed by e-mail which promotes a unilateral cause (such as making money for the sender). By creating and maintaining the MAPS RBL we are exercising our right to refuse traffic from anyone we choose. We choose not to accept any traffic at all from networks who are friendly in any way to spammers. This is our right as it would be within anyone's rights to make the same choice (or a different one, so long as only their own resources were affected by their choice).
Commerce is Good
Commerce has fueled the wonderful growth of the open data services market (which is presently known by the brand name: ``Internet''). We like commerce. We don't like theft of service. It makes no difference to us whether spam is of a commercial nature; we regularly receive spam concerning the death of society mavens, or concerning our possibly immortal souls, or concerning the postcard-oriented last wish of a boy dying of cancer in Florida. It's all theft of service, no matter what its content. It serves the sender and was unsolicited by the recipient. Consensually commercial activities are good. Unsolicited mass e-mail is always theft of service no matter what its topic.
Censorship and Free Speech
The right to free speech, in places which recognize it, means the right to print leaflets, stand on street corners, and offer to give them to passers by. Just as there can be no right to shout fire! in a crowded movie theatre, there is and can be no right to use someone else's printing press and delivery trucks to send your message to people who have not asked to see it. We are all, in the MAPS project and in every anti-spam coalition extreme advocates of free speech. However, we believe that speech is more free if the recipients hear what they choose to hear rather than what spammers want them to hear.
An electronic mailbox which is jammed to overflowing with spam may not even have room for desirable, consensual communications, but even if there are no resource constraints on a mailbox, the ability of the average Internet citizen to sift through mountains of spam, after paying to receive it is limited. How free is speech between two consenting parties if thousands of third parties are deliberately shouting messages at the first two?
As for censorship, we have heard the accusation many times but have failed to understand it each time. We don't care what two consenting people say in the privacy of their own channel. We don't care if people want to send each other traffic we consider boring (such as pornography or football scores). What we are trying to prevent is our paying, in money and resources and our own time, to receive and process, or relay, traffic which is nonconsensual in nature. We do not accept unsolicited mass e-mail, regardless of its subject matter.
Historical Context of Spam
One of the most famous spammers at the moment was in a past life the primary cause of the United States' Anti-junk-fax law. As a professional con man, he and others like him search perpetually for new ways to transfer the costs of their activities onto other people. Advertising, when done well, is expensive, and if it succeeds it is because it actually does offer some kind of value to the people who respond to it. Spam is another in a long line of methods of transferring advertising costs to recipients. Most of us get a lot of junk paper mail every day, and most of us throw most of it away without outrage. But what if it arrived with postage due, and with no way to refuse delivery or refuse payment? If you can envision that, then you are well on your way to understanding why we do in fact experience outrage when we recieve unsolicited mass e-mail, i.e., spam.
The number one most popular product to advertise via spam is: tools and data for the purpose of sending more spam. Number two is 1-900 phone sex and web pages of supposed schoolgirls doing things which are usually illegal for schoolgirls to do. Number three is pyramid schemes. Number four is the whole field of hair restoration creams, behaviour modification plans to make one more attractive to the appropriately-sexed partners, life extension drugs, and anything else for which a traditional advertising campaign would be inappropriate and unsuccessful.
The products advertised by spam would be merely another darkly humourous silent commentary on the sad state of human nature -- if we as recipients were not underwriting the costs of its transmission, processing, and storage.
Legality of Spam
Eventually, various governments will enact various laws which will make the sending of spam less commercially appealing, and like junk fax, it will fade away into background noise. Until then we as recipients of spam have to decide whether to spend whatever amount of effort and money it takes to receive and delete known-to-be-unwanted e-mail, or to spend some other amount of effort and money to try to prevent its reception. We of the MAPS project have chosen to spend our effort preventing reception for two reasons:
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Legality of Blackholing
As dual citizens of the Internet and of the United States of America, we worry every day about the Sherman Antitrust Act. Are our actions interpretable as conspiracy in restraint of trade? So far, no. We've been threatened with legal action on about a dozen occasions, and our legal advisors have said it will depend on the judge you get. Thus far no one who has threatened us has done more than initial discovery motions, so, for now, we wait. (No cases are pending that we know of.)
You can bet that the community will be hearing from us if we ever need a legal defense fund. Given that the number of spam victims numbers in the tens of millions, we suspect that the spammers don't want to sue us because of the popularity of our cause.
So-called remove lists
One common lie told by spammers is that they will in fact stop spamming anyone who asks by means of their insipid remove@domainname addresses. What they do is collect all the addresses of people who send to these so-called remove lists and make the collection available to their spammer customers with (wink, wink) instructions that these addresses ought not receive mass e-mail. What their customers do is add rather than remove these addresses. Removal is hard. Addition is easy.
You can try the same experiment we did. Create a new e-mail address somehow. Do not advertise its existence in any way: never send mail from it, never post news from it, do not add it to any mailing lists, do not use it in any mailto: links. When you're sure it's working, post it to a so-called remove list. Stand back and watch the spam pile up. It's easy, it's fun, and you should certainly tell the Better Business Bureau your results.
Consider this. We anti-spam workers are well known to the spammers and we are costing them a hell of a lot of time and money by making their work difficult. Don't you think that if there were a working remove list, we would be on it? After all, we're the ones who cause their mail relay victims to upgrade to non-relay mailers. We're the ones who complain to their providers and get their accounts and links cancelled. Don't you think that if they had any way to avoid spamming people, they would avoid spamming us?
Also consider that most of us own more than one e-mail address, and we do not necessarily want to send the whole list of these private handles to an industry who has demonstrated less ethics than a snake in the grass.
The whole notion of a so-called remove list (more properly called an opt out scheme) is bankrupt in any case. If we don't join a mailing list we do not expect to get traffic from it. Thus has it ever been, and so shall it ever be. If the sender bore all of the costs, including the cost in our personal time of deleting their spam from our inbox in order to find the mail we do want to receive, then an opt out scheme might make some limited kind of sense. But first, water will have to run uphill, and monkeys will have to fly out of places we can't talk about on the radio.
Responsibility for Spamming
We lost count a while ago of the number of times someone whose network we'd blackholed complained: we're not spammers, our customers are spammers and then advised please take your complaint up with them. Now, to be fair and balanced about all of this, there are indeed times in life when one is expected to be one's brother's keeper, and other times when one's brother will be expected to take all the heat by themselves. But for a network owner to try to escape responsibility for spam is a bit like an arms merchant trying to escape responsibility for dead civilians: if you knew in advance what the customer was planning to do with your technology, then you are culpable. If, once told, you do nothing to stop them, then you are culpable.
But as satisfying as these morality games are to all who take part in them, it makes no difference to us whether you are culpable or not. The fact is, we don't like to get spammed, and if your network is friendly or neutral to spammers, then we can't allow your network to touch our networks at all.
Relay Spam
Since professional spammers are widely blackholed, blockaded, and attacked, they tend not to try to reach millions of mailboxes directly from their own servers. Reasons vary from not wanting their connection to be shut down, to not having enough computational or bandwidth resources to actually send mail to every victim they want to spam. Their solution to this problem is called Relay Spam whereby they use third party mail relays owned by innocent and unknowing folks. Rather than opening 1,000,000 connections to 1,000,000 mail servers to pollute 1,000,000 mailboxes one at a time, they instead open 1,000 connections to 1,000 mail servers and pollute 1,000,000 mailboxes 1,000 at a time. This saves them horsepower and bandwidth, and also allows them to reach mailboxes on mail servers who would never accept a direct connection from a spammer's network.
Who are these third parties? Unfortunately, almost all Sendmail sites (which means almost all e-mail relays on the Internet) permit unlimited mail relay from any source to any destination. This is a holdover from the good old days when one could trust most Internet users not to intentionally annoy others and all Internet host operators not to intentionally steal service from others. There are tricks available but they were not a default part of Sendmail until recently. The Post.Office mailer has anti-relay features in its latest version. Alas, there are tens of thousands of mail relays on the Internet which will probably never be upgraded.
We blackhole relay sites, one host at a time, for 10 to 20 days at a time, as the only way we can think of to stop a relay spam in progress. Relay operators routinely contact us asking for help, and we routinely tell them exactly what they need to do. Our goals in doing this are to stop spam and educate relay operators. We almost always remove relays from the MAPS RBL as soon as we are contacted by an apparently-cooperative relay operator, and we spend a lot of our volunteer effort helping people upgrade their mailers to get them to stop relaying indiscriminately.
