On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Charles Sprickman wrote:
On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Lou Katz wrote:
Complain to the domain who got listed in the first place, wink wink, nudge nudge.
Ummm, the DUL is a list of dialup ports. When it was started, the intent was not to punish ISPs listed there, but to give mail admins a list of IPs that represent dialup ports, which generally should not be sending mail directly. It is not a mark of shame to be on the DUL. Some of us actually *volunteered* such information to maps.
That's actually the case here. The IP range in question was at one time dial-up ports, and we added it to the DUL. It was later recycled and removed from the DUL, but apparently not before others grabbed their own snapshot copies of the DUL. I suppose we'll have to be more careful and designate IP blocks as dial-ups permenantly from now on. Of course, I don't expect ARIN will buy that as "efficient use of space". I can just see going to ARIN asking for more IPs: We need to turn up more business customers, but all we have left are these old dial-up pool ranges. We can't give these blocks to our business customers because it's too big a PITA for them to find and get out of all the blacklists, so just give us some new IP space. Can you say "rejected"? I think you can :) This is kind of like (though not as bad) when AGIS was hosting Cyberpromo and others. How many ISP's manually blacklisted those IP blocks from their mail servers? Even after AGIS got rid of the spammer customers, those IP ranges were pretty much worthless. I wonder who, if anyone, is using them today?
Which brings me to another point that's been eating at me since maps went commercial... DUL seemed like more of a community effort than RBL or RSS. Many entries were added by people volunteering their own information with the idea that it was for the "common good". I for one, feel shafted that this list to which I contributed, is only available if I choose to pay a sizable amount of money.
I feel the same way. We spent time occasionaly making sure the DUL was in sync with our dial-up blocks, adding and removing IP blocks as necessary. Now, we no longer have access to the DUL. We also no longer have an easy way (CIDR text format) to scan the entire DUL to see which of our blocks some bozo has incorrectly nominated, and MAPS blindly accepted. I still think it's worth maintaining, to reduce the number of complaints we'll get about spammers signing up for throw-away accounts on our network, but it's hard to justify spending time working on that now that we don't directly benefit from being able to use it. In fact, I suppose MAPS is largely to blame for the current situation. If they hadn't had their sudden change in policy, most networks probably wouldn't bother to create their own DULs. I know about several of the RSS alternatives, but has anyone setup a DUL alternative? If not, I'll consider doing it. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route System Administrator | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________