My life as a false positive
August 30, 2006 3:32 pm GeneralI feel a rant coming on.
More and more these days the email I send is bouncing back from third-party blacklist sites. Paul Graham has written about why blacklist based filters were so bad.
I am subscribed to one of the biggest ISPs in France (free.fr) at home. At work, my company is subscribed to the biggest ISP in France, Orange, formerly Wanadoo. I do not send spam from either work or home.
And yet, when I send mail to some people, it will come back with “Undelivered mail returned to sender”, with the painful message “550 receiving service provider policy blocks mail from dneary@xxxxx” in the reply.
This has happened to me so often, with so many people, that I really can’t quantify how much damage has been done. The worst part is, since email is pretty much the only way I have to communicate to these people, I can’t even let them know that they can’t receive my mail.
I have recently found out that one person I was trying to mail was behind a blacklist which was banning all email from France. That’s right, and entire country. That is antisocial behaviour of the highest order.
So, as an innocent victim in the (cue dramatic music) War on Spam, what can I do? Change ISPs? Raise my hand and say “Not I” to the blacklisters every time I get one of these? Complain to my ISPs that they aren’t doing enough to be part of the Coalition for a Spamless Web? Move out of France?
August 31st, 2006 at 12:49 am
I have this problem too, one of the smtp servers from my isp is in the banlist and also the whole adsl ip range.
Spam is a big problem, but this isn’t the solution.
Q
August 31st, 2006 at 2:09 am
Ok, I’d recommend to register your own domain. That at least requires your email partner to put you in his blacklist explicitely. Ok, if he is blocking the entire country he does not deserve better, but that is more an exception probably (and a .org domain might help here…).
At least in Germany registering a domain is cheap and most providers have SMTP servers. Pick a smaller service provider, makes it less likely to have it in the blacklist.
My personal grief are error messages for mails that have my address in the faked From:-header.
August 31st, 2006 at 2:18 am
I also have encountered numerous issues of the like. As I don’t use my ISP’s SMTP servers, I usually don’t hit many blacklists, but one of them is biting hard: mail-abuse.com. After trying to discuss the issue with them for quite a while, I’m convinced this RBL is administered by a bunch of fucking ignorants who deserve a long and painful death. The worst thing is, they sell this service, and if you ask their clients to stop using it so stupidly, they simply can’t because they want to use the thing they spend money for.
August 31st, 2006 at 2:43 am
Complain to ISP. This is THE way to solve this issue.
August 31st, 2006 at 2:51 am
Np237: yes, mail-abuse.com is the bane of my life.
Simon: Is that really a solution? It just seems to be moving the problem further down the line. I do have enough knowledge to set up a small server at home with bind and postfix, but I still have to route my mail somewhere. Isn’t it a better idea to fix the bloody spam filters?
August 31st, 2006 at 4:27 am
Wanadoo used be one of the worst spam source networks anywhere, they were positively crawling with trojaned systems and their abuse handling was non-existent. Unless this has changed recently, I’m not surprised people don’t want e-mail from them.
More generally, banning e-mail from netblocks marked as dynamic/residential is an effective way of making a large dent in your spam load. If you don’t like this, fine, but it’s not likely to change. Either convince your ISP to give you a static IP with delegated rDNS or relay your mail through a proper mail server provided by someone else (especially in the case of Wanadoo, I’d recommend that this someone else not be your ISP).
As for Graham’s rant, anyone who labels a boycott “terrorism” is not worth listening to.
August 31st, 2006 at 5:02 am
My ISP’s email server will automatically add special header tags to all messages that come from overseas ISPs. I have Evo dump them in a special folder to keep them out of my regular email. I look through all the subject lines to make sure none of them are legitimate emails before I delete them. I don’t remember the last time I found a message in there that wasn’t spam. The problem is that foreign ISPs don’t enforce policies to prevent their systems from being used for massive spamming. Please complain to your ISP to get them to institute an anti-abuse policy and in the meantime get a GMail account or something.
August 31st, 2006 at 9:04 am
Blocking entire countries may seem extreme, but I can understand why people do it. Personally I reject all of Asia, but as an ISP we have to accept mail from almost everywhere. Spamhaus-xbl listings, however, are the one exception that we do make.
Gmail is hardly a solution either, as they are constantly getting blocked on a number of DNSBLs.
August 31st, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Tomas: these ISPs (Orange and Free) don’t want to lose time in discussing with mail-abuse.com. I can understand that as they have no business with them.
Johan: Free is providing its customers with static IPs, this is a reason for their popularity among geeks. However mail-abuse.com has banned several /16 networks of static IPs. I tried to discuss the issue with them and they don’t even understand the level of stupidity they have reached.
August 31st, 2006 at 11:33 pm
segphault wrote “The problem is that foreign ISPs don’t enforce policies to prevent their systems from being used for massive spamming”
A quick look through my junk folder suggests that over half of the spam emails I have come from a (probably forged) .com email address. Perhaps I should just blacklist everything from a .com domain? After all, the biggest convicted spam-king was running his operation from Florida.
September 14th, 2006 at 3:57 am
according to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4929716.stm , the united states are the worst spam senders worldwide.
how funny that mainly americans are defending blocking france “because they send so much spam” while i can’t find a blacklist that blocks american email…
TOP SPAM NATIONS
1) United States – 23.1%
2) China (inc. Hong Kong) – 21.9%
3) South Korea – 9.8%
4) France – 4.3%
5) Poland – 3.8%
6) Spain – 3.3%
7) Germany – 3.0%