UCEProtect Level 3

Fri May 8 13:02:14 UTC 2009

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 3:10 PM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net> wrote:
> It is.  I understand what they are trying to do but we were cut off
> from some places because someone else in the huge upstream we are with
> did something that appeared to be spam.  It's too broad of a brush.

It's not the tool or list itself, but the horrible manner in which
someone chose to use the list.

Those places who chose to perform cut offs blindly based on the
listing are responsible, and have their own users to answer to..  The
UceProtect L3 website displays a very prominent  admission of guilt
(they are open about their listing criteria):

"This blacklist has been created for HARDLINERS. It can, and probably
will cause collateral damage to innocent users when used to block
email."

So there should be little ignorance on the matter by users.   The
value of the list is heuristic, for scoring, e.g. SpamAssassin score,
and use of the list should be combined with an informed decision,
before blocking mail from a sender based on it.   Under those
conditions, lists like that can be quite useful.

If you try hard enough, you can find virus scanners that identify
clean system-critical files as possible malware,  and firewalls that
identify normal surfers as evil hackers...

If you have that software and didn't do the research, that's your problem.
If you have that software and set it to automatically delete files, or
if you have the overzealous firewall and you wrote a script to IPban
based on firewall log,  the firewall is not responsible for _that_
problem.

The list/tool  provider is  only an accomplice,  to the extent that
they misinform you, or encourage you to use the list/tool in a poor
way  given the tool's limitations....

--
-J