When this question first arrived, I mediated on why would anyone even bother to set up a RBL these days, as if there aren't enough players. Some do charge for the service if you are a large volume user, but to charge you do need a track record to prove your worth. RBL seems like a not so profitable place for a start up.
Now a RBL does get a stream of meta data. To some degree, they know who is emailing to who. If you are the only user of a domain, the meta data is focused. I suppose that data could be sold. That was the limit of my "deep thinking" (cough cough). Regarding Digital Ocean, I'm on their VPS. I catch very sporadic hacking from their clients, like one every one or two months. Being a client, I report the incidents. But unless you are on a one month free trial account, sending spam or hacking from a VPS seems like a bad idea since your IP is unique. On a hosting company, your IP is mixed with all their clients. You get lost in the noise. One of the reasons I set up a VPS was to specifically not get tarred with spammers on a hosting company. I'm not so sure Names Cheap implies a shady business these days. Old school registrars like Verisign have become like Go Daddy, so there is no premium neighborhood as far as I know. Original Message From: Bill Cole Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2016 10:45 AM To: Postfix users Reply To: Postfix users Subject: Re: bad.psky.me RBL? On 6 Apr 2016, at 10:48, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote: > Is anyone familiar with this RBL and its quality? Not a whole lot of > info at <http://bad.psky.me/about/>. Terms seem probably ok > <http://bad.psky.me/terms/>. Not trustable: in blackhat vs. whitehat terms: nowhere to put a hat) 1. Not clearly the responsibility of any human or corporate entity of any reputation of any sort. 2. They have illegitimately appropriated the "RBL" trademark originally registered to MAPS and still used by Trend Micro, owner of all of the old MAPS IP (and when last I dealt with them, even some vintage 2000 MAPS operational assets...) 3. Bogus domain registration info. 4. Apparently reliant on a tiny number of commodity "cloud" VPS's for everything: web, base domain DNS, and DNSBL DNS. 5. Weird DNS formal structure. Wildcard SOA for *.bad.psky.me but no matching wildcard NS, which could lead to corner-case breakage, because they don't return NXDOMAIN for *ANY* query. Evidence of DNS incompetence, not what you want in a DNSBL operator. 6. Use of providers (NameCheap & Digital Ocean) that are notable as recently preferred providers of professional snowshoe spammers. This doesn't mean that their data is bad, but unlike the Spamhaus lists or even the tragically shoddy Trend Micro versions of the RBL and other MAPS lists, it's clear that bad.psky.me is run by someone lacking a range of resources (courage, technical skills, cash, integrity, etc.) needed to merit trust in a DNSBL.
