On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 10:58:52PM -0400, Alex Rubenstein wrote:
I've had a little run-in with SPEWS, and the crowd on news:news.admin.net-abuse.email.
I'm curious; do folks take these guys serious?
I'll admit, we had an issue with a customer who spammed, and it took us a little while to zap him. Nevertheless, he was zapped. He had a /27, and SPEWs listed the entire /24 surrounding it. When I asked about this, they said, in not-so-many-words, that by doing this, punishing innocent bystanders, that as long as the ISP noticed and fixed the issue, this was essentially OK to do.
Of course, I disagreed, and was called all sorts of names that I'd not used since I was 14.
So, to the point; what is the consensus on SPEWs? I've never really noticed them until this point.
I hate these people. I've been in a block listed by SPEWS for quite some time, over 2 spams from customers in like 2 years. They didn't send mail to abuse@, they just started blacklisting every IP they could find and justifying it by claiming that the ISPs involved need to be filtered until the customers are gone. What ticks me off is there is noone to talk to about it, you are expected to grovel on some usenet group and hope that they are reading and will remove you after sufficient heckling. The problem is that all the thousands of people installing Spam Assassin have it set to check relays.osirusoft.com with enough weight to kill an email by default, osirusoft references many lists with political agendas, and then mail starts bouncing. I for one refuse to play that pathetic little game, I keep myself listed as an example of why people should not use them. So far I've had a fairly large number of people who decided they would rather get email from me, but it's still mildly annoying. Not to sound too much like our friend Mitch, but people who run blackholes with agendas are really sitting on a lot of power to abuse. The end users who install software like Spam Assassin usually have no idea that a couple chains down the link there are insane people injecting bunk data. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)