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

Spam blacklisting is out of control

blog.roastidio.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 430 posts

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#51

Post by thaumaturgy »

vorpalhex wrote: post #35
rsync wrote: post #31

I'm dealing with this right now. Both my personal domain and rsync.net are on a distinct subnet, but that subnet is smaller than a /24 and someone on a different subnet has, apparently, behaved badly. Enter "abusix" ... One of my engineers had an enlightening webchat with one of their engineers where we were shown the "offending" IP and it was explained that they have no ability to distinguish subnets (and no interes…

> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself. Even if it's not required by the letter of the law, you should add it. As an example: Amazon automatically opted me into an "alert" when a wishlist I viewed had a new viewer. Since…

~rsync runs a storage service for offsite backups. You think they should add a one-click "unsubscribe" link to service alerts?

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#52

Post by Shared404 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #35
rsync wrote: post #31

I'm dealing with this right now. Both my personal domain and rsync.net are on a distinct subnet, but that subnet is smaller than a /24 and someone on a different subnet has, apparently, behaved badly. Enter "abusix" ... One of my engineers had an enlightening webchat with one of their engineers where we were shown the "offending" IP and it was explained that they have no ability to distinguish subnets (and no interes…

> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself. Even if it's not required by the letter of the law, you should add it. As an example: Amazon automatically opted me into an "alert" when a wishlist I viewed had a new viewer. Since…

For rsync however, it seems more likely that it's instead things like disc quota or expiring service.

At least based on my understanding of rsync-the-company and rsync-the-hn-commenter.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#53

Post by pixl97 »

reaperducer wrote: post #33
huhtenberg wrote: post #15

> Or I can leave the current hosting company Yep, that's the one. If your hoster doesn't care about spam spreading from their IP space, you should take your mail server elsewhere. There's literally nothing to think about. And if they do care about this issue, they are likely to be taking steps to remove any of their IP space from the blacklists, without being nudged. PS. I've been running a mail server for close to 2…

When I first started monitoring spam connections years ago, it was almost always home cable+internet providers. They seem to have gotten the message and cleaned up thier acts. As of last night, the number one source of spam for both the personal and company servers I maintain is Digital Ocean. Which is a shame, because otherwise I'm a happy Digital Ocean customer. But because of this, I would never move any of my com…

I'm not sure that home IPs have cleaned up their act, I think it is that no large email host accepts their email any longer so spammers have stopped sending from there.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#54

Post by wl »

derefr wrote: post #46
wl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. Which is to say, you're a paying customer of a service and we send you some kind of alert or critical announcement ... and it should have an unsubscribe link. You absolutely should. The amount of junk I get because someone else signed up for something and fat fingered their email ad…

That's a (very legitimate and important) reason to do double opt-in unilaterally for all email communications. Companies should make 100% sure that the person who signed up, and the person receiving the email, are the same person, before they associate the email with the account. Otherwise, malicious people can sign up arbitrary third parties for tons of random crap. But it's not a good reason for adding unsubscribe…

> So consider the extreme case: what if the user fat-fingers an unsubscribe (without realizing) to their local electric company's e-invoices, which is what been relying on to prod them to log onto the site and pay the bill?

To name a specific example of this problem, I want Gulf Power of Florida to stop sending exactly the kind of email you speak of. Bills. Nastygrams when the person falls behind on the bills. Unwanted power saving tips. Calling the company and sending them postal mail has not helped. It all gets marked as spam these days. If they had an unsubscribe button, it wouldn't.

If the email is so damn important, they can go back to sending postal mail to the service address when someone unsubscribes.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#55

Post by thaumaturgy »

rsync wrote: post #31

I'm dealing with this right now. Both my personal domain and rsync.net are on a distinct subnet, but that subnet is smaller than a /24 and someone on a different subnet has, apparently, behaved badly. Enter "abusix" ... One of my engineers had an enlightening webchat with one of their engineers where we were shown the "offending" IP and it was explained that they have no ability to distinguish subnets (and no interes…

FWIW, Mailgun has worked pretty well for me in the past as an alternative to handling delivery myself.

You might not be able to go this route if your customers have some expectations about how your email is handled, in which case this recommendation is here for anyone else that might read this and need another thing to try.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#56

Post by pixl97 »

convolvatron wrote: post #21
pandemicsoul wrote: post #7

Spam blocklists are run by an unaccountable cowboy cult that somehow has managed to consolidate a ton of power simply for the fact that most people who run email inbox services didn't want to deal with the problem of spam, so they were more than willing to just hand over anti-spam "enforcement" to anyone who was allegedly doing "what was best for the internet." There's no check on these people who run these blacklist…

no. its because of spam. just because these people are doing a less than perfect job of keeping the screaming hordes out of my inbox doesn't remove any of the blame from the hordes.

It's been years since I last hosted my own mail server, and even then the HAM to SPAM ratio was well over 1:100. The torrent of absolute crap faced at port 25 is unbelievable.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#58

Post by rsync »

vorpalhex wrote: post #35
rsync wrote: post #31

I'm dealing with this right now. Both my personal domain and rsync.net are on a distinct subnet, but that subnet is smaller than a /24 and someone on a different subnet has, apparently, behaved badly. Enter "abusix" ... One of my engineers had an enlightening webchat with one of their engineers where we were shown the "offending" IP and it was explained that they have no ability to distinguish subnets (and no interes…

> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself. Even if it's not required by the letter of the law, you should add it. As an example: Amazon automatically opted me into an "alert" when a wishlist I viewed had a new viewer. Since…

"You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself."

What would that even look like ?

You're a paying customer of a service - they charge you every month - and you use that service ~daily ... and then you unsubscribe to emails ...

So then what ?

We just keep taking your money and when the service fails or there is an outage or critical notification we ... just don't send it ?

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#59

Post by yosamino »

istillwritecode wrote: post #27
pandemicsoul wrote: post #7

Spam blocklists are run by an unaccountable cowboy cult that somehow has managed to consolidate a ton of power simply for the fact that most people who run email inbox services didn't want to deal with the problem of spam, so they were more than willing to just hand over anti-spam "enforcement" to anyone who was allegedly doing "what was best for the internet." There's no check on these people who run these blacklist…

Let's not classify all spam blacklists as the same. UCEPROTECT is in a special class of extortionist cowboy, because it's basically just an inaccurate protection racket throwing a wide net across cloud providers who won't play their game. Some other blacklists are updated regularly and only contain IP addresses that have actually sent spam. By contrast, UCEPROTECT3 just lumps ISPs into the list even though an address…

> CEPROTECT3 just lumps ISPs into the list even though an address has never sent spam.

But this is by design[0]

> This blacklist has been created for HARDLINERS. It can, and probably will cause collateral damage to innocent users when used to block email.

And it makes for a perfectly usable blocklist. If you use postfix, the postscreen_dnsbl_threshold and postscreen_dnsbl_sites parameters let you create a simple scoring system:

  postscreen_dnsbl_threshold      = 10
  postscreen_dnsbl_sites          =
    zen.spamhaus.org*5,
    bl.spameatingmonkey.net*5,
    dnsbl.sorbs.net*4,
    bl.spamcop.net*4,
    dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net*3
I made up the numbers, because you will need to monitor your system for a while to see if they make sense, but the principle holds. Also make sure that the dnsbl you are using are working for you.

But it isn't really a problem with uceprotect, it's about how DNSBLs are used.

[0] https://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=3&s=5 [1] http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#postscreen_dnsbl_site...

Post reply on HN