Please note that the only reason I'm sending anything about spam to the list is because spam has affected the list directly. This message is not meant to start a discussion about spam or anything related to spam. Please do *NOT* post followups to the list unless they're directly related to ERPS or the list. If you wish to ask or say something about spam, reply to me directly. There are plenty of lists and forums about spam out there. This is not one of them.
The ERPS list server, 64.71.149.252, was listed on relays.osirusoft.com (a spam blacklist) for a week or so with no notification and very little explanation except that we're hosted by Hurricane Electric which apparently also hosts some spammers. The relays.osirusoft.com web page states that they don't wish to be bothered for anything that's not listed as 127.0.0.2 or 127.0.0.3 in their database, and we were listed as 127.0.0.4, so I did not contact them about it. This listing resulted in several bounced emails from the main list, causing about five people's subscriptions to be disabled. In my infinite generosity, I contacted all five of these people to let them know what was going on, though the most recent notification (this morning) was a bit terse, because I left it up to the subscriber to interpret the bounce message for hirself. I reinstated four of the five disabled subscriptions, because we appear to have dropped off of the blacklist. The fifth already subscribed from a different address. I am certainly not going to ask the kind people who are donating the network bandwidth and address space to ERPS to change ISPs just so we can avoid a broad blacklisting. This, apparently, is what those who blacklist entire ISPs would like us to do. They are doing damage to a nonprofit organization and to those who are donating to a nonprofit organization. In the future, I will probably not bother contacting people whose subscriptions are disabled due to their use of a spam blacklist. I have already updated the list subscription web page and the welcome message to warn people about this, so everyone can consider themselves warned. I used relays.osirusoft.com for my own mail server, and it dropped several list messages. Not good, since I'm the list administrator. Initially, I just whitelisted our block, since relays.osirusoft.com blocks so much spam. However, I later also noticed that SPEWS (one service that feeds relays.osirusoft.com) repeatedly blocks the Linux kernel mailing list, so I just stopped using relays.osirusoft.com entirely. For now, I must recommend against using relays.osirusoft.com or any blacklist fed by SPEWS on your own email, except as a warning or for score-based filtering only. The blacklists I use for my own server (but can't recommend without knowing your own requirements) are relays.ordb.org, list.dsbl.org, proxies.relays.monkeys.com, and bl.spamcop.net. bl.spamcop.net is by far the most effective of these lists. For more information on spam, spam blacklists, blocking spam, and complaining about spam, see your favorite search engine. The only current commercial service I current recommend is SpamCop at <http://www.spamcop.net/>. If at this point you're thinking about posting a followup, please reread the first paragraph again. If you do post a followup just because I asked you not to and you're already on thin ice (you know who you are), you may suddenly find all your posts moderated. -- Sean R. Lynch KG6CVV http://www.chaosring.org/~seanl/
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