[Cialug] SPAM Class C

[Nicolai]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 02:05:55PM -0600, David Champion wrote:
> Spamhaus is a great RBL until they block you for extraneous reasons and you
> have to try to get delisted.

I've been blocked by Spamhaus in 2 situations.  The first was when I
took a new job a long time ago and my employer was already blocked due
to running an open relay.  I shut down the open relay and a day or two
later, the Spamhaus listing was removed.

The second time was when I ran a naive and tiny web crawler that must
have triggered something in their system, not sure what.  In any case,
when I stopped the crawler, the IP was removed from Spamhaus.

That's how Spamhaus works: stop the behavior that caused the listing,
and the listing gets automatically removed.  You don't have to contact
them or pay them money (like at least one DNSBL).

> For instance, user opts-in to a mailing list, then some day decides they
> don't want it anymore, too lazy/stupid to click unsub, reports it as spam,
> you get listed because this is obviously your fault.

In that case, the mail provider (e.g. Gmail) would perform the blocking,
not Spamhaus.  Spamhaus runs many spamtraps looking for mail sent to
bogus addresses, and I'd assume mail that violates certain conditions.
That's how they compile lists of bad senders.  Spamhaus doesn't get spam
reports from mail providers.

It's easy and kind of fun to run your own spamtrap.  I did it for a year
once.  Was pretty interesting.

Nicolai