On Thursday, April 7, 2005, 2:58:19 AM, Nick Askew wrote:
The vast majority of people on the Internet do not know or care what ZDNet is. The only time they are going to see a ZDNet URL is when it arrives as part of some spam. They would quickly benefit if ZDNet was listed.
I disagree. ZDnet is a well known technology news site. If we listed it, then anyone who mentioned their site could get their message blocked. I think that would be wrong.
If I were to open my SMTP server so that any spammer could use it to redirect mail I'd be prepared to bet that I would end up (quite rightly) on a black list within hours and yet despite the warnings ZDNet have taken weeks and done next to nothing and are still not black listed.
Sure, but sender RBLs are not the same as what we're doing. Listing a mail server/sender is not the same as listing a domain to be checked against URIs. If we listed your domain askew.nl it would mean mentions of your web site would get messages blocked. That has a lot more impact than just blacklisting your mail server since it means no one (using SURBLs) would hear mention your web site.
Many people keep thinking in terms of old-fashioned RBLs, but we're doing something quite different. :-)
Actually it's just occured to me that all this illicit spam traffic could be quite useful for someone running a redirector. All they need to do is make it look like you are open for a couple of weeks and get the spammers really interested. Then intercept the illegal redirects to create traffic for their own site. They can effectively spam anyone they want without having to worry about the implications because after all they didn't actually do anything wrong. I'll have to quickly create my own redirector and then sit back and wait for the hits.
Not sure what you're saying. If spammers created their own domains for redirecting spam, we would blacklist those domains and blacklist the domains they redirected to.
I doubt that any legitimate organizations would gain much from intercepting and redirecting spammer's use of their redirectors. More likely it would make people mad at them for appearing to advertise their own site using spam. How many spam fighters would like that? Probably not many.
Jeff C. -- "If it appears in hams, then don't list it."