October 17, 2005
In the hands of the anti-spam bigots

My server (the one serving this page) also handles my personal email. It runs no public mailing lists, it's not an open relay even if it once was so I was very surprised to learn that my server had been blacklisted by a spam database. The base in question was sorbs and the error of my ways was apparently "sending email to spamtrap adresses". Spamtraps like that are not accurate in any way shape or form. There's plenty of ways email from my server could legitimately end up in any email folder, starting with the obvious case of someone using the spamtrap address as the sender address for spam to my server. This kind of test will have tons of false positives.
Annoyed as I was that these people were groundlessly causing me problems I went looking for a way off the list only to learn that SORBS demand you pay a 50$ "fine" to get off the list. The SORBS anti-spam bigots are oblivious to the fact that their test is quite simply broken. Blackmail. It doesn't really matter thay you can pay the money to a self proclaimed charity (a legal defense fund for some anti-spammer) it's still blackmail. No wonder they need a legal defense fund; this ought to be illegal. It's a pity for the good cause (spam prevention) that jerks like this are tainting the concept of an anti-spam database. Contrast this with the polite service you get from ORDB.
Needless to say I'm not going to pay, so I can only recommend if you have any connection to any system using SORBS, that you stop doing that immediately.

Posted by Claus at October 17, 2005 11:08 AM | TrackBack (0)
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