Jeff Chan wrote:
If you think blacklists should be free, then you should set up your
own, spend thousands of hours per year on it, undergo constant threats
of DDOs or worse, and listen to complaints if you dare to consider
being partially paid for your work.
Yes!
And some need to start asking themselves why there is such a huge
graveyard of very promising DNSBLs that were off to a good start... but
then suddenly died. There are literally dozens of such DNSBLs that have
died within the past few years. The reason is simple. Altruism and/or
that "high" one gets from all the "pats on the back" for their "free"
DNSBL eventually gets old and certainly doesn't pay the bills... and
running a high-quality DNSBL is VERY costly, both in terms of personal
time and resources involved. Risk of harassment and DDOS attacks is very
real and protecting against these can be costly as well. The time and
effort involved can suck the life right out of anyone and someone saying
that this time/effort/resources/risk should always be donated for free
SHOULD be offensive to people like Jeff Chan, who I personally can
verify for a fact has donated thousands of hours of his unbillable time
helping ALL of our spam filters to be better via his efforts with SURBL
(and elsewhere).
DNSBL operators like Jeff (and others) are NOT the Energizer Bunny!
(BTW - really, more ISPs need to move to RSYNC... and we should ALL be
running local DNS caching servers)
Rob McEwen
