Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 02:00:52PM -0500, Don Rua wrote:
> Tarus Balog wrote...
> 
> >"SPEWS is like torch wielding villagers, and I
> think the "too dumb or too slow" remark applies more to people who use
> them."
> 
> SPEWS, Vipul's Razor, and their ilk seem like your competitor's best friend.

Um, no. First of all, Vipul's Razor - which I used for nearly two years
and provided spamtrap feeds for, until I got sick of their servers going
down and staying down - doesn't "list" IPs or domains. It simply allows
you to calculate a hash of message parts and compare that hash to others
that came from reported spam. Period. And they have a highly secretive
trust system, so attempts to game the system tend to get your trust levels
revoked in short order.

> A competitor sends a few complaints, maybe signing up for your newsletter
> just to get a copy to send in, and your business and customers get toasted
> with no clear way to resolve. Or, if I blast out 10M offensive emails
> through an open relay, and I include your url as links throughout them, the
> vigilantes will be my muscle to harm your business.

Every BL service I've ever dealt with (via posting to SPAM-L or via
other public forums, in the case of SPEWS) has eventually resolved the
problems. The more reliable BLs are particularly receptive to logic,
proof in hand of a confirmed signup, etc. I'm not aware of any cases
where a competitor has gamed the system, but I'd be curious to see if
you can find any.

Besides, few services offer any sort of RHSBL service, where specific
domains and hosts are blocked; the ones I've seen are focused more on
spam sources, not on tracking it back to the one who "benefits" from a
spam run.

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