On Sun, Mar 27, 2005 at 05:57:13PM -0500, Dean Anderson wrote:
Look, if I want to publish a blocklist of all domains with the string "er" in them and all IP addresses ending in .7, that would be a silly thing to do: but after all, it's just a list.
There are consequences, of course, to doing irresponsible things, and to misleading your subscribers, and to blocking email that your subscribers didn't authorize you to block.
Well, you know, as much as a pain as everyone seems to think SORBS is, this approach to the thing has a certain baby/bathwater feel to me, Dean: it seems to make running a blacklist *at all* A Bad Thing... which, my perception is, is *not* the sense of the Net. As for "didn't authorize you to block", two thoughts come to mind: first, the person with the last clear chance in a mail blacklisting situation is the mail admin in question, is it not? If you're running blacklists, and you're concerned about what they block, I should think it would be up to you to back-check the judgement of the BL operator by doing end-to-end testing. And second, to the extent that you *are* using a given list, I suspect (and IANAL, of course), that you are -- constructively -- allowing them to act as your agent for the purpose of deciding which mail to block (absent caselaw to the contrary, which I'll admit I haven't researched), which gives you a lot less leeway to be mad at them. And of course, the only *real* liability you ought to have in the first place is to *your users*, and as long as you're disclosing to them that you use mail BL's, then that one's a bit arguable, as well. Cheers, -- jr 'IANAI,E' a -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me