>>Piqued my curiosity, asked around, got back this as a possible >>explanation: >> >> See http://www.us.sorbs.net/faq/spamdb.shtml >> >>I have *no* idea who Joey McNichols be, or why he needs a legal defense, >>etc., but it seems as though the whole SORBS thing might be on the >>up-and-up, if unpopular o those who got zinged by it.
>No matter what, the ISP has to pay their way out of the blacklist. >It still seems to be a crappy way of running a spam blacklist to me. My >mail hosting provider is a small company, and probably couldn't afford >to stay in business if they had to pay $50 for every piece of spam that >some of its less-virtuous customers chose to send. Which is kind of the point. If a provider doesn't impose at least minimally-intrusive measures to prevent spamming (eg, maximum of N emails sent per hour, progressively slowing to a crawl with increasing volume, etc.), ie, things which wouldn't affect you or me no matter how prolific we are in emailing, but which would cripple spammers (eg, do I personally need to send 1000 emails in one shot?), then quite frankly, if someone *does* abuse it, the provider can't cry foul that they're blameless victims. Believe me, I wouldn't shed a single tear if pissed-off vigilantes would quite literally hunt down and kill the top 10 known spammers and set their computers on fire, so I personally am willing to "suffer" not being able to send 1000 or even 100 emails in one day (as long as they're queued up and not lost, should I want to send announcements to friends that I'm changing an email address, etc.). If a provider can't/won't put even minor inconveniences to dissuade spamming, then they deserve to be SORBSed. If SORBS would pocket their "fines", that's one thing, but as they explicitly don't want to be connected with any charities they approve of in their list, that to me seems to be on the up-and-up. Have Bram ask SORBS to include among the list of approved charities those that assist Ugandans and Ethernopians and whatnot. Let some good come out of spammers' eee-vil actions, and the providers who unwittingly abet them. To use an analogy, if I leave a loaded gun or samurai sword or something, out on my front lawn, and some idiot kid goes and hurts or even kills someone with it, can I insist that I'm blameless in the matter? Or should I instead bear some of the blame for my recklessness? The more I think about it, the more I gotta agree with SORBS, that if some provider did something to trigger being blacklisted, they *should* in fact have to pay. Maybe next time they'd look a little more closely at their clientele. If you want a waiver to send more than N emails/day (eg, for a mailing list), let the provider at least look into the content and make sure you're not hawking V1AAgrA or fake R0L3X watches or whatnot. All that being said, did your provider (the Z-thing?) explain *why* it may've gotten blacklisted in the first place? I'd look into that first. <shrug/> >Another thing I wanted to point out is that my mail is *never* bounced >by any other mailing list or anyone else to which I ever send mail. Kewl. Hope you don't have any more problems with it.
