Affects of the balkanization of mail blacklisting

Sat Aug 11 18:20:39 UTC 2001

I might be willing to, if I could be assured that a decent number of large
providers would participate.

On Sat, 11 Aug 2001 jlewis at lewis.org wrote:

> 
> On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Lou Katz wrote:
> >
> > > Complain to the domain who got listed in the first place, wink wink,
> > > nudge nudge.
> >
> > Ummm, the DUL is a list of dialup ports.  When it was started, the intent
> > was not to punish ISPs listed there, but to give mail admins a list of IPs
> > that represent dialup ports, which generally should not be sending mail
> > directly.  It is not a mark of shame to be on the DUL.  Some of us
> > actually *volunteered* such information to maps.
> 
> That's actually the case here.  The IP range in question was at one time
> dial-up ports, and we added it to the DUL.  It was later recycled and
> removed from the DUL, but apparently not before others grabbed their own
> snapshot copies of the DUL.  I suppose we'll have to be more careful and
> designate IP blocks as dial-ups permenantly from now on.  Of course, I
> don't expect ARIN will buy that as "efficient use of space".  I can just
> see going to ARIN asking for more IPs:
> 
>  We need to turn up more business customers, but all we have left are
>  these old dial-up pool ranges.  We can't give these blocks to our
>  business customers because it's too big a PITA for them to find and get
>  out of all the blacklists, so just give us some new IP space.
> 
> Can you say "rejected"?  I think you can :)
> 
> This is kind of like (though not as bad) when AGIS was hosting Cyberpromo
> and others.  How many ISP's manually blacklisted those IP blocks from
> their mail servers?  Even after AGIS got rid of the spammer customers,
> those IP ranges were pretty much worthless.  I wonder who, if anyone, is
> using them today?
> 
> > Which brings me to another point that's been eating at me since maps went
> > commercial...  DUL seemed like more of a community effort than RBL or RSS.
> > Many entries were added by people volunteering their own information with
> > the idea that it was for the "common good".  I for one, feel shafted that
> > this list to which I contributed, is only available if I choose to pay a
> > sizable amount of money.
> 
> I feel the same way.  We spent time occasionaly making sure the DUL was in
> sync with our dial-up blocks, adding and removing IP blocks as necessary.
> Now, we no longer have access to the DUL.  We also no longer have an easy
> way (CIDR text format) to scan the entire DUL to see which of our blocks
> some bozo has incorrectly nominated, and MAPS blindly accepted.
> 
> I still think it's worth maintaining, to reduce the number of complaints
> we'll get about spammers signing up for throw-away accounts on our
> network, but it's hard to justify spending time working on that now that
> we don't directly benefit from being able to use it.  In fact, I suppose
> MAPS is largely to blame for the current situation.  If they hadn't had
> their sudden change in policy, most networks probably wouldn't bother to
> create their own DULs.
> 
> I know about several of the RSS alternatives, but has anyone setup a DUL
> alternative?  If not, I'll consider doing it.
> 
> 

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