Hi Bill,
You are correct, it was SPEWS that did that not Spamhaus. I was
probably thinking of Spamhaus because out of all of them that's the most
useful one.
I've run a public mailserver, a small one, commercial, for 15 years
now. Over the years I've been RBL listed a few times due to some of my
customers having poor password hygiene and having their email passwords
stolen. One thing about that happening is that you very quickly learn
which RBLs are actually effective or not. And while there's a huge long
list of them on mxtoolbox, I eventually learned it's not worth the time
to request delisting on any of them other than Spamhaus, and Google's
private RBL and Microsoft's private RBL because those are the only ones
that people actually use. And even among them, Spamhaus isn't used as
much anymore as it used to be.
What is unfortunate is the promise and idea of an RBL is really good.
What always falls down with them is the execution. These days more and
more ISP's are getting very very good at listing their dynamic IP
blocks, the problem though is that there is no standard for doing so, so
there is no automated way to generate an RBL list of dynamic IPs. It
takes a human being with much experience in global IP numbering to be
able to read numbering authority records and understand them and query
rwhois databases and so on. Microsoft and Google are willing to pay top
dollar for experienced people do to this - but few others have the cash,
it appears, to do it. And, putting all dynamic IP blocks on the
Internet in as permanent entries in an RBL is the most basic first step
needed to build an effective RBL. I've never seen real email sourced
from a mailserver on the Internet that had an IP in a dynamic block.
(by dynamic block I'm talking about number blocks that ISPs have
designated as what they assign dynamic IPs to their customers from)
Fortunately it has been many years since I've had problems with RBLs
listing me. Unfortunately, neither Google or Microsoft allow queries
into their private RBLs even from customers, and frankly I'm not really
afraid of being listed by Spamhaus nowadays. The 2 that are killers if
you get listed on are Google and Microsoft. They also take forever to
get off of if you do get listed and are adaptive so even if you aren't
listed by their first level blocks, if you have been listed in the past,
even if you clean up everything and get delisted from their first level
blocks, they still tend to mark more mail from you as spam. And Google
hides it's junk mail folder so the uninitiated and unwary Gmail user
doesn't know that there even IS a spam folder. Many has been the time
in the past that I have had customers complain that one of their
corespondents isn't getting mail they send to them, and I check and see
it's google doing the mail processing, so I send them a bunch of
screenshots showing how to access the spam folder in the gmail
interface. To Google's credit, once 3 or 4 of their customers move mail
from you out of spam into their inbox, it greatly increases your ranking
so your mail doesn't go into their spam folder anymore, but if their
customers don't know there is a spam folder in the first place....
Ted
On 4/25/2026 2:59 PM, Bill Cole wrote:
On 2026-04-25 at 17:13:16 UTC-0400 (Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:13:16 -0700)
Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:
Why is this a problem?
I understand a number of years ago when Spamhaus decided to charge
they set the former free stuff to report -everything- as spam to
encourage people to stop querying them
THAT NEVER HAPPENED.
If it had, I would be the first person to zero out their SA rules.
Such things HAVE been done by others, sometimes intentionally and
sometimes accidentally when shutting down. It's a reckless,
incompetent, and rude choice that Spamhaus has never made. Spamhaus
had some brief glitches of "listing everything" or nearly so on their
automated lists but it has been many years since the last such event.
You are likely thinking of some other former DNSBL operator. The
TrendMicro version of MAPS may have. SPEWS did it. Gordon Fecyk did it
with the list he started after leaving MAPS. NJABL did it. There's a
RFC specifying how to NOT do that when shutting down. Spamhaus has had
some brief glitches of "listing everything" or nearly so on their
automated lists, but it has been many years since the last such accident.
To this day, it is possible for a low-traffic mail server to use the
Spamhaus lists without registering or being blocked. You are better
off registering for the (often free) data query service to avoid being
treated like an anonymous user and it includes data sets that are not
part of the free DNSBLs.
However, I just installed SA - using defaults - and it's not marking
every piece of mail spam. So I have to conclude that either SA
removed that rule or Spamhaus stopped doing that.
THEY NEVER DID THAT. NEVER. **YOU ARE SPREADING LIBEL**
