On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Thomas Cameron wrote: > Over and above any of the door-pulling comparisons, I was pretty PO'd > because the siglinux list admin used what I consider pretty juvenile > tactics. As a mail-server admin myself, I have to give anybody in charge of these things the benfit of the doubt. It is very difficult to find just the right middle ground between too open and too closed. I've learned over and over on these sorts of issues that 99% of the time, everybody involved has the best intentions, they just disagree about how to implement solutions. > Banning a mail server at a big ISP like RR is not cool, no matter how > indignant you are that they pass spam. I work from home a lot, and so I use > their smtp server for my outbound e-mail when I'm there. It is just plain > irritating: I get a bounced back e-mail because some idiot somewhere who I > have absolutely nothing to do with spammed off a server I have no control > over. I have to pay with my time and inconvenience?!? You've got to be > kidding. > > Don't punish the man on the street because of some turd's actions. Punish > the turd. What's interesting to me (and from the discussion going on, I get the feeling that now everybody knows this) is that the RoadRunner official mail server was added to ORBS back in August, they presumably ignored ORBS' warning, and then exactly 1 month and 1 day later, TW closed the open relaying, and was changed from open to closed status on the ORBS list. In other words, there was a turd (named TimeWarner), but they (eventually) cleaned up their act. Now, the other interesting thing to me is that when I look up my current RR IP address in ORBS' databse, I get back the following response: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX is not in the automated open relay database But, when I tried to send mail to siglinux two days ago with the same IP, I got a bounce pointing me to ORBS. So, as far as I can tell my IP address is in ORBS limbo. It's not in the automated database, but it clearly is in the lookup that mail server's use. But there is no way for me to determine what I can do to remedy the problem, so what is this meant to accomplish. >From what the mail server admin explained to me, ORBS add's all RR user IP's to the list because they can't verify that they AREN'T open relays. Checking http://www.orbs.org/hallofshame.html shows that indeed, TW won't allow ORBS to probe their user's IPs, but that ORBS assumes that those IPs must have open relays behind them. So now the situation is that there isn't necessarily a turd, but if ORBS can't determine one way or the other, they're going to assume that we're all turds. And this is where my biggest problem with ORBS lies. Indeed, even if ORBS could probe RR user's IPs, they couldn't really nail down a list of who was a turd and who wasn't since most of the IPs are assigned dynamically anyway. Ideally, ORBS would see the logic of not adding dynamically assigned IP addresses to their database and take RR off their "Hall of Shame", but barring that, I would hope that the list admin continues to leave ORBS filtering off (even if a little bit of spam comes through). After all, if we become so aggressive in our fight against spam that we inhibit the intended use of email, how valuable is the forum that we're supposedly protecting. -- Public key at www-swiss.ai.mit.edu | Shane Williams /~bal/pks-toplev.html | Systems Administrator UT-GSLIS =----------------------------------+------------------------------- All syllogisms contain three lines | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Therefore this is not a syllogism | www.gslis.utexas.edu/~shanew --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Send administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
