Spamhaus and Barracuda Networks BRBL

Mon Feb 22 20:24:59 UTC 2010

On 2/22/10 11:40 AM, Dave Sparro wrote:

> Actually I can sympathize with Barracuda on this one:
> Bob's Widgets is running thier own mail server for their 25 employees.
> They decide the need better spam filters.
> They can hire Bob's nephew to drop in a Linux server running Postfix and
> SpamAssassan.   In this situation it's OK for Little Bobby to configure
> the Spamhaus RBLs for use on this solution.
> They could also hire Barracuda to do essentially the same thing
> (assumption based on source code published at
> http://source.barracuda.com/source/ ).  In this case Bob's Widgets is
> not allowed to use Spamhaus.
> 
> Their list, their rules; but it is indeed strange to me.

Bob is in the widget business, he profits from selling widgets.  He
doesn't profit from the spam-filtering business.  Spamhaus is, out of
sheer niceness to the community, willing to accommodate one-off widget
makers with some freebies.  Thank you. Spamhaus.  We appreciate it.

Barracuda is in the spam-filtering business, they profit directly from
it.  Spamhaus isn't willing to allow a for-profit entity to deploy their
filters on thousands of machines at substantial cost to Spamhaus in
terms of bandwidth and server load without being compensated for it.
This seems reasonable to me.

If Bob's Widgets' nephew syncs Bob's machine to the University of
Wisconsin's NTP server, it isn't a big deal.  When Netgear hard-codes
UoW's NTP server's IP into a gazillion consumer boxes, it is.  That's
the difference.

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/

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