[extropy-chat] I am being censored

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 10:47:14AM -0800, Kilroy wrote:

> I realize this is probably accidental,
> but the potential for abuse is interesting.

RBLs are notoriously prone to abuse. No submission
checking whatsoever is done, and none is possible
automatically. 

Unfortunately, people in general do not weigh the full implications 
of their actions, and just act reflexively in the majority of cases. I've
recently had an interesting discussion with an ISP who silently
introduced SpamCop on our mail server. Now SpamCop operators
are nutters, and fully deserve to be DoSed out of the sky, but

	http://jhoward.fastmail.fm/spamcop.html

the ISP owner was actually genuinely trying to explain that
he was doing us a service, while we were getting confirmed
bounces from three different providers -- our customers couldn't reach us.
That was a feature, not a bug in his lights! Just as 
good this was an email exchange, not an audio link. 

Now it's trivial to operate your own mailserver on one of
*nix machines we had in the racks, but I wanted a solution
everybody could administrate after I'm gone, so an RBL-free 
email feed did cost the company 700 EUR (MTA license and
one-time configuration). Nice, huh?

This is very much like using a flamethrower to address 
tragedy of the commons overgrazing: lots of roast cattle,
smoking ash, no grass, no overgrazing: problem solved.

Maybe we *are* doomed.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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