[NTLK] [META] AHBL blocks telefonica (was: Re: testing)

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Mon Apr 26 2004 - 07:38:44 PDT


Aux environs du 26/04/04 à 16:18 +0200, sous le titre "[NTLK]
testing", Daniel Padilla prit sa plus belle plume pour écrire les
mots suivants:
> Hi people. Forgive this test.
> http://www.ahbl.org/notices/setel.php

Daniel, Newtontalk does not do RBL filtering, and will not as long as
I will have root powers on the server where it is hosted. Plus it
wouldn't make much sense on a list closed to non-members.

However, some (or a lot of) Newtontalk readers may be affected by
these stupid lists and they may not be able to read your
contributions. In that case, their server will either drop your
e-mails silently or generate a bounce message that you will never get
anyway because all bounces go to Victor and he doesn't have the time
to handle them.

For a long time e-mail was said to be unsure and unreliable, but it
proved to be very reliable because correctly operated servers
normally send a bounce message whenever some e-mail could not be
sent. This was reliable when one could understand such a message.
Newbies could reply to these messages and get explainations from mail
server administrators or they would often understand that it was
related to some e-mail they tried to send.

However, nowadays, with viruses and spams and anti-viruses and
anti-spam filters, we get more and more bounce messages. Few people
understand them and, usually, people who do get a huge amount of
these and they often no longer read them.

Unfortunately, all the so-called spam solutions I read about so far
yielded to directly make e-mail less reliable or give spammers and/or
virus writers ways to exponentially increase the amount of
mailer-daemon messages that will be transfered.

Black lists (or RBLs) are known to yield to an average of 65 % of
correct blocking and up to 10 % of false positives. This is
definitely the worst solution. Users usually value legitimate mails
way more than spending time to delete spam to accept such a
proporition of false positives.

People didn't care when the affected countries were Taiwan or Korea.
I wish they would start to care with Spain, but I'm not sure they
will. A mail administrator prefers that a user no longer loses some
of their legitimate e-mail because they will never complain anyway to
getting complaints that they get too many spams or viruses.

Paul

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