[clug] Mysterious delivery problems

[Alex Satrapa]

On Wednesday, May 21, 2003, at 09:56 , Tim Potter wrote:

> Admittedly there are a lot of spammers on nanae trying it on in order to
> get their blocks removed which makes for amusing reading, but their
> policy of being assholes to anyone who has a complaint kind of loses its
> charm after a while.

Not assholes - just lazy.

They block "proximate netblocks" because in their experience, getting 
other people to do their work for them (hassle ISPs about cleaning up 
the spammers) is much easier than listing only the netblocks that are 
causing the problem.

As anyone who has tried laziness knows, it's a very habit forming 
behaviour pattern :)  You start by being lazy about one small thing 
(writing /24 instead of /26), and it spreads to being lazy about bigger 
things (being obnoxious to everyone, since it's too hard to read their 
messages and determine whether they're a whining spammer or a mailing 
list manager with a genuine complaint).

I agree with Matthew - RBLs (or "blocklists" since Osirusoft isn't an 
RBL - the distinction seems to be semantic rather than operational) tend 
to cause more harm than good - I value the one lost "ham" more than I 
despise the thousands of blocked "spam" mails.

Alex
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