[extropy-chat] the RBL racket

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Mon Jul 31 10:37:43 UTC 2006


On 7/31/06, Eugen Leitl wrote:
<snip>
> I could easily use "my bike got stolen in that part of the town"
> excuse to destroy streets leading into that part of the city.
> That will teach the inhabitants to look out for my bike in future.
> Or not.
>
> Of course this is racketeering, and if you do business with
> RBL operators you're directly supporting the mafia.
>

Your argument really only applies to 'overkill' spam blacklists, like SPEWS.

Your spam email filter program builds its own blacklist from spam you
personally receive. Most RBLs are just accumulations of people
reporting spam received. In windows, I tell Mailwasher to check the
CBL, Spamhaus, VISI and Spamcop RBLs against my POP3 email account.
I've had no problems with doing this. (Admittedly my POP3 account is
now mainly a spam trap, since I moved to gmail).

ISPs are busily flagging the spam you receive and moving it to your
Junk Mail box. But they still refuse to stop the zombie boxes in their
domain sending out the spam in the first place.
80% to 90% of all email traffic is now spam. And now that spammers are
switching to 'image' spam to avoid detection, the storage and
bandwidth bloat is increasing rapidly.

The battle continues. Desperate measures may be necessary.

BillK



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