SORBS on autopilot?

Fri Jan 15 19:08:52 UTC 2010

In a message written on Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 01:26:49PM -0500, Jed Smith wrote:
> Let me reiterate for the benefit of Ricky Beam, Ken Chase, Leo Bicknell, Paul,
> and anybody else who is tempted to debate Michelle in this thread: you are 100%
> wasting your time.

Good advice, for sure.  Fortunately in this case I have no interest in
debate.  I've posted my $0.02, and I'll let people take that for what it
is....

> Your time is much better spent contacting every mail administrator on the
> Internet who 5xx's your relay's mail, or asking your upstream to move you out of
> the affected block.  Both will result in more productivity than debating anybody
> that works for SORBS or who is a colleague of Michelle Sullivan.  You might be
> right, she might be right, and in either case it doesn't matter.  Move on.
> There are far more pressing matters in life.

There is something to be learned here.  Blocking e-mail based on
ANY single service is likely to be a disservice to you and your
customers.  I have yet to see a "mistake free" block list from
anyone.

Tools such as SpamAssassin allow you to score e-mail based on
responses from many services, including SORBS.  Make sure you're
using 6+ services, and at least two, and preferrably three must
agree before you toss the mail as spam.

So when you contact that mail admin, tell them to remove whatever
DNSBL's they have at the SMTP transport level and let SpamAssassin,
or a Barracuda, or other similar tool make decisions based on
corroborating multiple sources of information.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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