Trustic Anti-Spam Service To Close 173
An anonymous reader writes "I recently received an email from the anti-spam service Trustic saying: "We have decided to close the Trustic service. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of accuracy that we require, and an inaccurate system is worse than no system."" We covered Trustic's anti-spam service, which billed itself as "a community-based block list that prevents untrusted servers from sending spam", as recently as a couple of weeks ago.
On blocking spam (Score:5, Informative)
Re:On blocking spam (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed, I've been using SpamAssassin and would say it averages about 2 missed spams per 1,000 messages and almost no flase positives (I don't have a exact number but I would estimate about 1 in 20,000)
SpamAssassin (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, it's not exactly a trivial install for your typical Windows/Outlook user, but the fetchmail/procmail/spamassassin/IMAP combo I have running now is hard to beat for a well oraganized email system.
Re:On blocking spam (Score:2, Informative)
I use SpamAssassin for one of my clients who lives and dies by e-mail, and it is pretty effective for them. There is an ISP who I deal with sometimes and they also use SpamAssassin. They
Re:On blocking spam (Score:1)
I also believe it's been over two months since I got a false positive.
Re:On blocking spam (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistical anti-spam methods work NOW because they are at the bleeding edge of the spam game. Only a few of us have bayesian filters going, and so the spammers haven't caught up.
Meanwhile, when the spammers catch on, that is to say, once enough ISPs or individuals install bayesian filters that they notice that their spam isn't getting through, they'll compensate, just like they have with EVERY other anti-spam "technology" out there. In fact, I suspect it's already happening - my SpamBayes Outlook add-in is catching less now than ever before. It still does a good job, yet, but false positives are up as are uncaught spam--all this despite 100,000+ "training" spams (I get about 700-1000 spams a day). Why? Spammers catch on. Email looks more innocuous. There are more clever tricks.
I suggest, therefore, that statistical methods are EXACTLY THE WRONG SOLUTION in the long run, therefore, because their net effect is that SPAM will look more like regular email, thus disrupting email service in the long run even more. Yes, it makes sense for an individual on the bleeding edge like you or me to run statistical stuff, but the ultimate answer to SPAM is:
Law, litigation, jail, and accountability.
that's it. it works in other countries, and it could work in yours and mine too. yes, there's that sticky problem that the internet is global, but fortunately there is no government in the world that is ideologically "pro spam." At best, there are ignorant governments that can be manipulated into stupid net tricks as tuvalu and turkmenistan were with their country suffixes, but that's a temporary thing.
SENSIBLE REGULATION OF THE NET TODAY, PLEASE.
not big brother, not slashdot-esque slippery-slope arguments of how once a government gets their hand on anything they can't stop, just reasonable law enforcement and law. if you show a stranger's 7 year old a picture of a man sucking off a donkey in almost any city in the world, you will go to jail. Yet on the internet this happens daily and nobody is punished OR EVEN SOUGHT.
Re:On blocking spam (Score:2)
Re:On blocking spam (Score:2, Insightful)
In the EU, privacy laws protect people's privacy by forbidding to use personal information (e-mail address included) about persons which didn't give explicit written consent to do so, or which do not already have a business-relationship with you. The privacy-laws were not written to protect against spam, but they work perfectly in stopping spam.
If only those other countries outside Europe would also enact similar laws, spammers would all be fined into oblivion and the In
Re:On blocking spam (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading once that responsibility is the flip side of freedom...when you ask someone to take care of something (e.g. regulation), you give up the responsibility, and therefor have no right to complain about the loss of freedom. Because we are only free to the level that we are willing to take personal repsonsibility for our lives and the society we live in.
Re:On blocking spam (Score:2)
And how does this theory relate to spam?
Your quote is accurate when it comes to consensual issues (drugs, prostituition, gambling, etc.), ho
Re:On blocking spam (Score:2)
Re:On blocking spam (Score:3)
Not to sound like a troll here, but how would your 7-year-old's email address get on the Internet in the first place without him/her violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)?
I think you made some very valid points, though.
Re:On blocking spam (Score:2)
Re:On blocking spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:On blocking spam (Score:2)
I wouldn't be opposed to a simple amendment clarifying that the junk fax law in the US applies to Spam (it seems to me it does anyway, but I understand the courts are for some reason reticent to apply it.) But I fear, with good reason, that any legislation that is realistically going to be passed is going to be something very different. It will not only have the slippery slope type provisions you mention, and set a very bad precedent for the future in that respect, but it will also excempt lots of so-calle
Re:On blocking spam (Score:3)
There are two reasonable ways to make it cost money to send messages. One is to charge a tiny postage fee (say one cent, or even 0.1 cents) for each message you read. The other is to demand 'payment' in terms of CPU cycles, by getting the spammer to compute something before constructing a valid message.
Jail for spammers is one way to 'make it cost', but
This is really too bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad Philosophy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think any blocking is better than no blocking. The only 'bad' thing is false-positives. If you lower your blocking to prevernt false-positives, you still have a service that is desired even if you don't catch them all...
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:5, Funny)
Then block all mail from odd-numbered IP addresses. A full half of all spam comes from those addresses!
The only 'bad' thing is false-positives.
Oops!
If you lower your blocking to prevernt false-positives, you still have a service that is desired even if you don't catch them all...
Ah, change it to only block prime-numbered IP addresses. Much fewer false-positives, and you are still blocking some spam.
Seriously, I'm really impressed that Trustic had the ethics to back off when they determined that the system didn't work. I hope they'll be back with a better system.
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:5, Funny)
This reminds me of a story:
A guy was speeding along many others along a highway. He was later pulled over by a policeman. The guy cracked, "But everyone was speeding, why did you get me?" The police then asked, "Have you ever gone fishing?" "Sure.." "Have you ever caught them all?"
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2)
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2)
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2, Insightful)
> blacklisted, even though I'm totally innocent.
You are giving money to an ISP that is spam friendly.
You are directly at fault for them being in business still.
You are not at all innocent.
Change ISPs. Tell your current ISP why you are changing.
Give your money to an ISP that actually cares about the spam problem, and isnt itself the spam problem.
The blame falls not just on the spammers, but the people that keep spammers in busi
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2, Troll)
You are directly at fault for them being in business still.
You are not at all innocent
Riiiight.
You are smoking a joint, so you support terrorism, correct? "Directly at fault" I would say...
So, dissy, tell me, do you take upon yourself all the sins of corporations the products of which you use?
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2)
> would say...
If my dealer was a terrorist, then yea.
But no dealer i know is a terrorist.. They are usually just some dude that likes to smoke to the point they buy in bulk and wanna make a buck on the side.
Maybe higher up dealers have that problem, but I dont know, I never met one.
If i knew a dealer i bought drugs from turned around and bought guns to do war shit with, then no, i would not buy from that person.
You
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:3, Informative)
I think we'll have to agree to disagree here.
You see, judging from the metric fuckloads of spam coming from 24.0.0.0/8, I'd guess that AOL-TW cares more about the pubic hair on Ted Turner's soap bar than ridding their network of (clueless re
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2)
You and me both. I wish I didn't have to block them (and don't even get me started on South America :) globally, but them's the breaks. Without blocking all traffic from those cesspools, my inbox was unusable.
Fer chrissakes, uu.net (!) did it with their pools of leased
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:3, Interesting)
Change ISPs
If only it were all that simple. Some blacklists make an honest effort, others are far too broad. In cases I have seen, people have found themselves on a blacklist because:
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2)
Blacklists don't mind, being simply a list, and not having a mind. People choose to implement the lists of their own free will. If you don't like that, write to them to try to change their mind, or use another ISP which doesn't implement the blacklists, if you can. But don't take it out on the poor lists - they never done nothing.
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:5, Insightful)
- at the source: make it unprofitable for the spam to be sent in the first place. this can be done by either:
- at the tansmissionn level: get rid of those relays! if it is technically too difficult to send spam, the amount will drop accordingly.
- at the recipient level: this is where filtering fits. really this is just a subset of 1.1 - removing the market. if no one sees the spam because of the filter, they won't buy and spam becomes unprofitable.
looking at this analysis, it seems that 3. is the best option because it helps acheive a lack of market and profitiablity which is the only permananent solution...- fines or other state sanctions.
- lack of market.
1. is faster in the short term - but as long as spam is profitable, there will be those willing to risk sanctions. 2. takes longer and is a bit pie-in-the-sky, but eliminating the market is the only permanent solution.however, an imperfect filtering system defeats this formula. consider: if a filtering system can be bypassed with some effort on behalf of the spammer then those spammers who have the kung fu to get their mail through acheive a distinct competitive advantage over their competitors. if there are 10 spammers sending you 10 messages a week, you have 100 spams. that's a lot of "noise". if you filter these spams but one spammer can get through the filter, you are only getting 10 spams. that's "good" but - and this is a big but - that spammer now has way less competition. the signal to noise ratio goes way up for that one spammer and his/her individual messages become more effective because there are no competitors in the inbox!
the result is that imperfect filtering may put nine spammers out of business, but the one remaining will make a killing. eventually that one spammer will pick up the other nine's contracts and, boom, you're back to 100 spams. new spam agencies will rise to the new level to cash in on this profitable venture and the cycle starts all over again.
and that's bad.
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2)
They're putting a number of legitimate people between a rock and a hard place because it's very expensive to change providers when you're providing high-bandwidth connectivity, but at risk of losing customers who can't send the email they need to because their customers
Re:Bad Philosophy (Score:2)
I never said you did. You're just the man behind the curtain allowing clueless people thinking they're helping themselves to put legitimate businesses between a rock and a hard place. Because you refuse to accept any accountability, it's not even possible to correct any mistakes. You just blithely say "we can't be wrong, you're just in the slum. move." Regardless of how expensive that is. Expensive enough that it's entirely possible that a bus
One can dream! (Score:5, Funny)
"We have decided to stop distributing Windows. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of reliability and security that we require, and an unreliable and insecure system is worse than a non-MS system like Linux or MacOSX."
How does this rate against other filtering? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How does this rate against other filtering? (Score:1)
Re:How does this rate against other filtering? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why technology alone is not the answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Even Earthlink's vaunted SpamBlocker is not bullet proof, in spite of using it, I still get some spam that slips in through it.
This is one of the reasons why we need some decent laws on the books so we can either force spammers to cease or prosecute the bastards.
Why technology nor the law is the answer (Score:3, Interesting)
This is one of the reasons why we need to get to the root of the problem so we can neuter parents to preclude them from having these children.
Seriously, there's a problem with attitudes. What the hell happened in their childhood that promotes these people to ignore their conscience and annoy millions of people for the name of $? Once they're in their adulthood, no laws o
Re:Why technology nor the law is the answer (Score:1)
I agree with you, and I'd really like to know the answer to your question. Unfortunately, here in the United States this attribute seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
Re:Why technology nor the law is the answer (Score:1)
Offtopic. Don't Care. Will Crush. (Score:2)
Greed is that thing that happened in their childhood that promotes these people to ignore their conscience? Please explain.
If you're gonna make an offtopic response to make a remote analogy, in order to push your opinion about music sharing, atleast make the analogy work right.
If yo
Re:Why technology alone is not the answer (Score:1)
It would also have other benefits.
Problem? I couldn't get venture capital funding to build it. I've still got a business partner who is looking for money. If we get money, I'll build it. Unfortunately no one wants to put money into something that would compete with Microsoft's system. (They are working on a stupid, fatally flawed
Re:Why technology alone is not the answer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why technology alone is not the answer (Score:2)
Then you could start a consulting firm that integrates it into a companies existing infrastructure.
Re:Why technology alone is not the answer (Score:1)
"What you think of spam"??? Why am I reminded of a B-movie alien who announces to a startled earthling: "We have been monitoring your so-called 'television' transmissions for ten of your Earth years"?
I disagree (Score:2)
Re:Why technology alone is not the answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology alone isn't the answer.
Getting government involved won't help, however. You're going to kill the good and let the bad live going that road.
Spam can be stopped, with the current technology (with 10-15 year old technology, actually) with a little social and economic help.
Ask yourself, how do spammers make any money out of being pains in the ass?
Mostly by scamming their employers, of course. They tell regular small business folk they'll do 'legitimate marketing' and get them to pay for it before the results of that marketing, a swarm or pissed off people who want the poor folk to die and will certainly never buy from them, appear. Those sources won't last forever, people wise up after getting burned like that.
No, to have a stable source of income. The serious spammers are hooked up with contracts with BIG ISPs. Small ones won't work, because when we find out who they are we threaten them with the black hole and they fold quick.
But there are a handful of really huge providers that threat doesn't work on. It's just not realistic to blackhole someone that provides backbone service, someone that has so many legitimate users you do more harm than good when you cut them off. They know that, so if a spamhaus offers them a sizeable premium they feel safe hosting them. That is the big reason that current efforts like MAPS haven't practically eliminated spam already.
The key is to distribute the infrastructure. If there weren't any companies owning a large enough chunk of the infrastructure to fancy themselves immune to consequences, spammers would never be able to make a reliable profit and they would die out.
Re:Why technology alone is not the answer (Score:2, Interesting)
Spam filtering has always been a catch-up game in the past. However, with Bayesian filtering it seems that anti-spammers have deployed a solution p
Re:Why technology alone is not the answer (Score:3, Interesting)
The issue is that, while weak recipient authentication was built into SMTP, corresponding sender authentication was not; this means that everyone is always anonymous (except for name tags they write themselves), there is no accountability, and people beha
It takes Balls to admit that you're wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
The hope of finding a solution to spam is expressed in the final line of their current site welcome screen:
We remain confident that the problem of spam is a solvable problem. Thank you for your help with this great experiment.
God bless them for trying.
They just gave up too early. (Score:2)
Maybe all the mediocre hardware manufacturers should give up too. "Who needs another low-cost motherboard?"
Or maybe Red Hat and Mandrake should just give up because Debian is obviously better?
Maybe Yahoo and AltaVista should shut down their seach engines because we already have Google.
It would be sad if this was a trend in today's economy. Companies just give up because they think they can't make money.....
Whitlisting alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
As only a teeny tiny percentage of spammers supply genuine return addressess or read the responses the upshot in my case seems to be "new spray on no more spam"..
Inevitably some people don't read the first response or cannot be bothered to respond, but I guess those folks didn't want to contact me that badly anyway, so I don't want to read their messages that badly.
Marcus
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:1)
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:2, Insightful)
Try reading the comment again:
"Bill notifications and software registration keys etc would all fall victim to this, as you will often not know ahead of time what to whitelist."
The problem illustrated here is that often times you don't know what address to whitelist, and hence can't add it ahead of time.
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:2, Insightful)
And before someone says "just whitelist their domain", often times messages come from a completely different domain than the one you've signed up on. Personally that pisses me off, but it's a fact of life of outsourcing I suppose.
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:1)
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:1)
Seems to me that wadding through a junk folder to find messages the spam filter missed, isn't a whole lot better than having the junk sent to you in the first place. You still have to wade through the same amount of junk...doesn't matter if it's one legit message or 100.
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:1)
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:1)
I personally would be more likely to miss the one legit message in the junk folder...I suppose it's all about which method works best for you. I personally use dnsbls and spamassassin...gets almost a
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:2)
The basic deal is that you tell amazon.com that your email address is someuser-amazon-cryptochecksum@foo.net instead of someuser@foo.net. Any mail sent to that address gets right through to your mailbox. If Amazon ever starts spamming you, you revoke the address. TMDA has some front-end tools to make generating the addresses (handling the crypto) pretty painless.
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:1)
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:1)
I used to run a variety of filter-based anti-spam stuff (homegrown and SpamAssassin) and the occasional false-positives kept me constantly checking my "spamtrap" filter. Major PITA.
What I've found since using TMDA is tha
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:1)
Furthermore, as someone else pointed out wildcards in a whitelist seems pretty dumb to me. The whole point is to have each sender verify that their human...wildcards sort of defeats the purpose.
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=73536&cid=6
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
"Hello. You have reached my house automated answering filter service. Please leave your name and number and a brief message and I will call you back if I feel like it. Once I call you then you will be able to freely call me from this number at any time."
Re:Whitlisting alternative (Score:2)
Up to now, I'm lucky - currently, spam accounts for less than 10% of my incoming mail and most of that comes in via the alternate freemailer account that's victim to brute force spamming every other day. (I don't leave my main mail address at many places across the net.)
It's such a small amount that I could almost ignore it, but instead i use it to train my POPFile installation which is already very good at sorting not only spam, but all
It really wasn't very accurate (Score:5, Informative)
I've been doing some research about the accuracy of different spam-blocking solutions, and Trustic had a huge false-positive rate. It misidentified 8% of my personal non-spam mail as spam, including mail from my Mom (it blocked our local cable ISP completely), my aunt (it blocked some AOL MX's), my insurance company (who the hell knows why), security warnings from CERT, and the NANOG mailing list.
It did have a good blocking rate---65%---but using a combination of other RBLs (the most optimal I found was DSBL + SpamHaus + Blitzed) it's possible to block nearly 75% of spam with only a .02% false positive rate (a single mailing list correspondent with an Argentinian ISP that has open relays was blocked).
It really is probably best that they laid this project to rest.
Re:It really wasn't very accurate (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest problem spam assassin has as far as false positives appears to occur when people attach text from a commercial web page rather than a URL pointer. This invariably causes the email to get identified as spam, particularly if the page text contains any references to commerce.
Mozilla's Bayesian (Score:2)
I'll take Mozilla's filter over that. By now, I have over 98% spam tagging rate, and I've only ever had 1 false positive, and it was an autorespond from a company (hardly counts). It has seen about 1500 spams or so.
What we need is a massive spam repository to train those Bayes filters.
Re:Mozilla's Bayesian (Score:2)
Excellent! My first question is how you actually get a 1:1 ratio of spam:non-spam?
Re:Mozilla's Bayesian (Score:2)
You should talk to the guys at Mozdev - I can't believe they wouldn't be interested. I think the mail filter should come with a "starter kit" of signatures that are used until the user builds up a decent library. And 15,000 is a lot - I've got probably 1/10 that. It should make for an interesting project.
Re:It really wasn't very accurate (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It really wasn't very accurate (Score:1)
RBLing from guys like osirusoft did a great job until i figured that they had practically black listed every single IP in Mexico (and we get like 30% incoming mail from here).
Would you be kind enought to share the figures you arrived to with the rest of us?
Re:It really wasn't very accurate (Score:2)
Here's a link to the numbers I've got. I'm working on writing more up about my methods, but basically what I did was sort all of my mail from the last 90 days or so into spam and non-spam, then simulated the use of these blacklists on my own personal mail. Also, the PDF file is a bit of a mess; something about Gnumeric's PS output or ps2pdf.
Re:It really wasn't very accurate (Score:2)
try
relays.osirusoft.org +
bl.spamcop.net +
blackholes.easynet.nl +
dynablock.easynet.nl
and you'll nail 97-99% of the spam upfront and not waste bandwidth accepting their crap
Re:It really wasn't very accurate (Score:2)
osirusoft was very slow in my tests (sorry, not quantified yet, but the tests took about 3 times longer to finish than other RBLs), had a higher-than-average false positive rate (0.26%), and it lost important messages---from a former boss from whom I needed a letter of recommendation, my insurance company, a prospective consulting client, and my MozillaZine welcome message.
bl.spamcop.net was better, but it still had a false-positive rate of 0.16%, about 8 times higher than others. None of the messages I l
Just needed more customers... (Score:5, Funny)
If only they had found a quick, easy, inexpensive way to solicit hundreds of thousands of new customers using the Internet they could have stayed alive!
Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Poisoned well problem (Score:2)
It's also a problem that will recur in any public cooperative effort. SETI@home has to essentially double their work because they know that it is possible that a large percentage of their results are crap. The problem is guaranteed to be worse if someone profits by poisoning.
The only answer I know of is validation. As I understand it, SETI@home ensures that any dataset is processed by at least two different nodes. I assume one problem with Tru
Vigilantism. (Score:1, Funny)
So thats why (Score:3, Insightful)
While I did my part to contribute to the Trustic database, I wasn't real sure about their methods. I submitted spam messages as they requested, but I had to tell them which address to consider to be a spam gateway. The addresses above that are marked positive. I always picked the first address outside of rr.com, but for all I know the nearest Roadrunner smtp system is a spam forwarder and I should have flagged it as negative. Pooling lots of people's ignorance won't necessarily provide good information.
Why not Whitelist? (Score:1)
I have been using a whitelist email for over a year and I can honestly say SPAM's don't bother me at all. It takes literally 4 to 5 seconds to look over 40 to 50 unapproved senders' message headers (enough for once a day). It is a LOT easier to sort out names you recognize from a sea of junk then the other way around. And when you get an email in the Inbox, you know it is somebody from y
Re:Why not Whitelist? (Score:1)
Use a hotmail/hushmail address to sign up for slashdot and other web forums and porno sites.
I get maybe a half dozen spams per year on my real account, and a couple hundred people and businesses have the address.
Re:Why not Whitelist? (Score:1)
Because customers tend to dislike it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Because customers tend to dislike it (Score:1)
Market For Spammers (Score:5, Funny)
statistical filters avoid blocklist pitaflls (Score:2)
Statistical filters such as Bayesian filters have the advantage of considering all mail, then filtering out spam based on content. In my testing on over 5000 emails over several months, I have only had 5 "false
whitelist servers (Score:1, Redundant)
When a user sends out to a new address it's automatically added to the white.lst this can also work for domains...
Another idea... have special filtering options available so if you fill out a form on a webpage, you can add a s
Trustic is good (Score:1, Insightful)
I didn't think his service was all that bad, it just needs some shaping up.
1) Pos query was a bad idea, since all emails are trusted by default and were overriding negative trust on real spam which results in way too many false positives.
A good solution would to create multi trust levels with a no status default query.
Example:
I enable trustic query on my mail server, then i login, i see all the m
Can be a server operators nightmare... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod me down if you must, but if there's going to be a central blacklist, there should be checks and balances to its system.
Re:Can be a server operators nightmare... (Score:2)
The problem with Trustic (Score:2, Informative)
The effect of this was that large mail servers (eg cable gateways, etc) which let through a very small percentage of spam but s detectable quantity, would get a host of negative recommendations and the server would become untrusted.
I don't think this was an unsolvable problem - it requires dealing with trust, and positive versus negative recommendat
Innocent victim of anti-spam systems (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole thing started when a spammer signed up for service at the hosting company that I have been with for several years. I have a server there with many of my clients websites on it (I am a web designer). So, the spammer purchased service at the same host as me, and happened to fall within the same IP block as I did. He was soon discovered and shut down, but the damage had already been done... spews and relays.osirusoft.com both put the ENTIRE ip block in their system.
Think about it this way: what can the host really do? The spammers come in, pay the setup fees, get one good night of spamming in, and then move on.
It took me several days to track down why some of my emails were not going through and who I had to contact to get removed from these lists. relays.osirusoft.com had some tools that is supposed to re-check, but it did no good... as far as I know, the thing doesn't even work.
In reading through these two websites, the self-righteous bastards that put together these lists really don't take any responsibility for their actions. They are quick to add entire IP blocks and take weeks to remove them even after the host has contacted them to inform them that the spammer has been shut down. These anti-spam lists apply fault to the host or to the isp implementing the list, but never to themselves, while at the same time preacing the wonders of the services they provide. If they don't want to take responsibility, then they should print more warnings about the mass amounts of false-positives that actually happen.
In addition to the anti-spam lists, the isps really need stop relying on these lists as the first defense to stopping spam. I had a chance to talk to one of them that a client of mine was going through and they told me that there was no way they could add me as a trusted ip because the anti-spam list comes in front of the exceptions list as a first line of defense. Even after we finally got removed from the anti-spam lists, many ISPs did not update their copies of the lists for weeks afterwards, causing more blocked emails even after we were off the list.
So, after hours and hours of frustration, fielding support calls, yelling, long distance phone calls, writing emails, reading page after page of self-righteous dribble, and trying desparately to explain that I just happened to have an IP address that was a coupled dozen numbers off of that of a spammer, as far as I am concerned, the more anti-spam lists that die, the better the place the world will be.
I hate spam. I cuss every fifth time I have to delete one (making that about 20 or 30 nasty words a day)... but the people who have really cost me the most time, money, and headaches are the anti-spam lists. Good riddance.
I called it (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=72548&cid=654
Wasn't too impressed, crazy that the O'Reilly people picked them of all folks, looked to me like the author had some connection with the service. Bad form.