On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 3:10 PM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> wrote:
It is. I understand what they are trying to do but we were cut off from some places because someone else in the huge upstream we are with did something that appeared to be spam. It's too broad of a brush.
It's not the tool or list itself, but the horrible manner in which someone chose to use the list. Those places who chose to perform cut offs blindly based on the listing are responsible, and have their own users to answer to.. The UceProtect L3 website displays a very prominent admission of guilt (they are open about their listing criteria): "This blacklist has been created for HARDLINERS. It can, and probably will cause collateral damage to innocent users when used to block email." So there should be little ignorance on the matter by users. The value of the list is heuristic, for scoring, e.g. SpamAssassin score, and use of the list should be combined with an informed decision, before blocking mail from a sender based on it. Under those conditions, lists like that can be quite useful. If you try hard enough, you can find virus scanners that identify clean system-critical files as possible malware, and firewalls that identify normal surfers as evil hackers... If you have that software and didn't do the research, that's your problem. If you have that software and set it to automatically delete files, or if you have the overzealous firewall and you wrote a script to IPban based on firewall log, the firewall is not responsible for _that_ problem. The list/tool provider is only an accomplice, to the extent that they misinform you, or encourage you to use the list/tool in a poor way given the tool's limitations.... -- -J