I hate spam every bit as much as the next guy and I applaud most moves on the part of ISPs to filter and block as much as possible. Thanks to SpamAsassin, I now receive maybe 1 spam per week with few false positives. I also am usually in favor of blocking e-mail from subnets known to be the tools of spammers.
However, this morning I needed to send an important e-mail to my sister who is living in Russia. In the last two days, somehow AT&T (or comcast) cable subnets have wound up on the blackhole list probably because of a couple of spammers who lived (probably briefly) on the AT&T athome network. Now I can't send mail to my sister. It just bounces back saying "we don't accept e-mail from spammers." Anyway, I don't blame them for doing this, but it just seems like wholesale blocking of a complete subnet is not productive at all. AT&T is very good about enforcing their anti-spam policies and all you need to do is tell them and they will shut down an account. Black hole listings should only be used when the ISP is uncooperative. Anyway, I thought I'd share this experience as it is the first time anti-spam techniques have actually bitten me. Michael -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
