Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

blog.sucuri.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 61 posts

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#41

Post by [deleted] »

barrkel wrote: post #39
dingdingding wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"expect to be able to use email" This just summarizes the problem. People "expect" to use a free email system and still be treated equally to those who pay good money for a legitimate SMTP host that cares about the quality of service they provide to their customers . Legitimate email providers take measures to ensure their customers aren't spammers and those who don't end up on the spammer lists and this is exactly t…

You wouldn't happen to be in the business of providing paid email accounts, would you?

[deleted]

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#42

Post by jacquesm »

barrkel wrote: post #39
dingdingding wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"expect to be able to use email" This just summarizes the problem. People "expect" to use a free email system and still be treated equally to those who pay good money for a legitimate SMTP host that cares about the quality of service they provide to their customers . Legitimate email providers take measures to ensure their customers aren't spammers and those who don't end up on the spammer lists and this is exactly t…

You wouldn't happen to be in the business of providing paid email accounts, would you?

No, he's just a troll. Expect him to delete his postings in a couple of minutes, he pulled that trick the other day.

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#43

Post by tptacek »

jmathai wrote: post #22
tptacek wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you blacklist the mechanism by which tens of percentage points worth of Internet users send mail, you are not part of the solution to spam.

True. I agree that it's a really clumsy "solution" - if you even want to call it that. I know for us it expedites our efforts to remedy our part of the problem. Not the right motivation and perhaps more harm than good but I'm not 100% sure.

Let me simplify your thought process here: it does more harm than good.

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#44

Post by jacquesm »

mustpax wrote: post #3

Oh Spamhaus, everybody who's ever had the joy of operating an SMTP agent loves them.

Just a little anecdote about how good spamhaus really is. I used to co-locate in Toronto, right next door to a bunch of heavy duty spammers. It so happened that there was a class C split in to three subsections, two of them belonged to the spammer and a tiny 16 host range in the middle that belonged to us.

Spamhaus figured this all out by themselves and took great care not to cause any collateral damage while going after the spammers. Pretty impressive, especially since that would have been very hard to figure out from the outside.

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#45

Post by mike-cardwell »

akadruid wrote: post #34

Does anyone know if this affects Postini? We've switched once already this month - our new office was assigned an IP by C&W business that is in the same block as thousands of Virgin home cable-modems, so we got blacklisted by Spamhaus and others. Management got quite twitchy so I moved all the outgoing email to go via our Postini account which was previously only filtering incoming. Don't fancy having to find a third…

Sounds like you got listed on the PBL. SpamHaus lets anyone delist their IP from the PBL...

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#46

Post by koenigdavidmj »

tptacek wrote: post #30
ryanjmo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by 'wholesale DNS-based blacklisting'?

Paul Vixie has proposed an extension to the DNS that would have relay cache servers (the servers you ask for generic name lookups) store blacklists of evil domains. Anything blacklisted would, in effect, disappear from the Internet (for normal users).

Out of curiosity, what would a `smart person' have to do to get all the domains back if this ever took root?

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#47

Post by someone_here »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #46
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Vixie has proposed an extension to the DNS that would have relay cache servers (the servers you ask for generic name lookups) store blacklists of evil domains. Anything blacklisted would, in effect, disappear from the Internet (for normal users).

Out of curiosity, what would a `smart person' have to do to get all the domains back if this ever took root?

An clean version of the DNS lookup table, of some sort.

An IP will do.

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#48

Post by dingdingding »

tptacek wrote: post #5
jmathai wrote: post #4

I work at Yahoo! and we've been blacklisted as well by Spamhaus. I wouldn't say it's entirely inappropriate because of the sheer volume of email that can pass through our (or in this case Gmail's) system. Personally, I've tried to reach out to Google regarding security issues on blogspot which were affecting our property. There was an XSS vulnerability and we were getting thousands of posts on our blog linking to blo…

If you blacklist the mechanism by which tens of percentage points worth of Internet users send mail, you are not part of the solution to spam.

As of June 2009, the latest stat I found, Gmail has 5.51% share of email users, 1/3 of either hotmail or yahoo mail. Definitely not "tens of percentage points."

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2839/email-client-p...

Re: Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

#49

Post by moultano »

jmathai wrote: post #19
moultano wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blogspot allows arbitrary javascript I believe, including redirects. I don't think that's a vulnerability. It's just run of the mill spam.

I guess that depends on definition. At yahoo the ability to use a product for spam is a vulnerability. If a spammer can email a link to yahoo.com/something/random which redirects them to mypharamasite.com then it's a vulnerability because the site allowing the redirects helps trick the end user into buying vicodin :). I can't imagine why javascript redirects add much value in a blog post. But everyone picks a differe…

>I can't imagine why javascript redirects add much value in a blog post. But everyone picks a different spot between features and security - and that's okay by me

There are a lot of people that have used blogspot as their host for a long time, but then decide to get their own domain and don't want to lose their readers. That's the motivation I've heard for allowing redirects in the past, though I don't know what the current policy is.

Blogspot is a lot more like a hosting service than an application in terms of what it allows, probably because it's one of the oldest.

Post reply on HN