This is Reprehensible!

by Michael Dinowitz

Do you want to know I wrote my own spam filter? Do you want to know why I am so against RBLs (real-time black hole lists)? The reason is really simple: because I cannot trust someone else to do the right thing. This was exemplified perfectly by the owner of the Osirusoft Black Hole list. What did he do that was so wrong? He black-listed the world.

Let me explain. Osirusoft was one of the major RBLs around, and as such was used by many people to check if email that they were receiving was spam or not. These many people range from technical gurus who can write mailservers from scratch to salespeople who wouldn't know what an email header meant, let alone how to define spam. The one thing that binds all these people together is that they were using a software or service that looked at Osirusoft as an authority. It looked at Osirusoft and said, "Tell me what I need to know. Is this message spam?" When the owner of Osirusoft banned the world, he made these people see the same message: that everyone was a spammer.

The reason why Osirusoft went down is because it was under a heavy DDoS attack (Denial of Service) and the owner decided to shut it down. He told people to stop using his service, but rather than just turning it off, he made his point by banning everyone.

If I was using Osirusoft as an RBL, that would mean that every list that I run would have the same problem, and I can't have that. For that reason, I do not use any outside RBLs. I do compile a list of IPs and domains that are spammers no matter what, to block, and have provided that to the community in the House of Fusion spam section -- but again, the question of trust comes up. Do you trust my material? All I can say is that having stored and analyzed many tens of thousands of spam messages -- I do.

Osirusoft Blacklists the World

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