From: David Schwartz [mailto:davids@webmaster.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 7:10 PM
Roeland Meyer wrote:
I don't need to check because I have a piece of confirmed spam from them. A smoking gun. That's the way MAPS RBL has been working for years. That is the way I expect it to continue to work. The main reason that I posted to this thread is that some of the posts lead me to believe otherwise. They were confused.
I think you're missing the big picture. If you receive a single piece of spam from a site, that's not automatically grounds to block the site. That's a recipe for maximizing collateral damage.
So the receipt of a spam from a site is the beginning of the process, not the end.
Actually, I simplified the process. I agree with you 100% here. I don't have the time for such an investigation therefore I use MAPS RBL.
Absolutely. Probe the machine that is of concern, not whole blocks randomly.
Also, only block the proven spam-host. No one else.
That's a more complex judgment. In most cases, I agree that this is appropriate, but I can think of (and have personally witnessed) more extreme circumstances. I've seen ISPs who say, "no, we like to spam and we will spam in the future". In those extreme cases, I'll block their entire address space from reaching my mail servers until their policy changes.
Another reason to use MAPS RBL.
No, its open-relay status is not irrelevant. If you know a site is an open relay, however you know this, and you want to block open relays (which I do) and it's my right to block open relays, then I will block them. How I find out they're an open relay is another story. The usual way is you probe a site when it becomes an actual problem.
I submit that if you have a piece of spam, from a site, and are blocking them, why do you need to probe them?
Well, if you're blocking them because they're an open relay and they say they've fixed the problem, it's certainly reasonable to probe them to decide whether you should begin allowing mail from them. Or do you think it's better to block them indefinitely just so that you don't 'trespass' by probing them?
I'm actually not advocating blocking all open relays. I am advocating blocking all spammers, whether they have open relays or not. There are actually open relays that a spammer can never use, because the open relay site uses MAPS RBL. The are collateral damage, with ORBS. Show me how such a site can be used by a MAPS RBL'd spammer. BTW, yet another reason to use MAPS RBL.
3) Do you think it's unreasonable to block known open relays as a protection against future spam.
Absolutely not. Our entire Norte Americano culture is biased AGAINST apriori restrictions.
The following is a real good example of why I don't like argument by analogy. Your analogy is broken. Let's deal with the issue directly. We actually seem to be on the same side here or not very far apart.
Nonsense! This argument would say that you should allow children to bring guns into school provided they haven't yet shot them. Our culture is biased against a priori restrictions upon speech imposed by the government, but there is nothing inherently bad about a priori restrictions.
You DO NOT spank someone for something that they have NOT, in fact, done. It's called prior restraint and there is a reason that it is considered unjust. It violates the PURE WAR ethos. There is no excuse for collateral damage. Innocents should not be involved, period. This is important because we DO have the technology to wage the PURE WAR and are ethically compelled to use it.