Re: Paid RBLs in default?

Hi Bill,

You are correct, it was SPEWS that did that not Spamhaus.  I was 
probably thinking of Spamhaus because out of all of them that's the most 
useful one.

I've run a public mailserver, a small one, commercial, for 15 years 
now.  Over the years I've been RBL listed a few times due to some of my 
customers having poor password hygiene and having their email passwords 
stolen.  One thing about that happening is that you very quickly learn 
which RBLs are actually effective or not. And while there's a huge long 
list of them on mxtoolbox, I eventually learned it's not worth the time 
to request delisting on any of them other than Spamhaus, and Google's 
private RBL and Microsoft's private RBL because those are the only ones 
that people actually use.  And even among them, Spamhaus isn't used as 
much anymore as it used to be.

What is unfortunate is the promise and idea of an RBL is really good.  
What always falls down with them is the execution.  These days more and 
more ISP's are getting very very good at listing their dynamic IP 
blocks, the problem though is that there is no standard for doing so, so 
there is no automated way to generate an RBL list of dynamic IPs.  It 
takes a human being with much experience in global IP numbering to be 
able to read numbering authority records and understand them and query 
rwhois databases and so on.  Microsoft and Google are willing to pay top 
dollar for experienced people do to this - but few others have the cash, 
it appears, to do it.  And, putting all dynamic IP blocks on the 
Internet in as permanent entries in an RBL is the most basic first step 
needed to build an effective RBL.  I've never seen real email sourced 
from a mailserver on the Internet that had an IP in a dynamic block.  
(by dynamic block I'm talking about number blocks that ISPs have 
designated as what they assign dynamic IPs to their customers from)

Fortunately it has been many years since I've had problems with RBLs 
listing me.  Unfortunately, neither Google or Microsoft allow queries 
into their private RBLs even from customers, and frankly I'm not really 
afraid of being listed by Spamhaus nowadays.  The 2 that are killers if 
you get listed on are Google and Microsoft. They also take forever to 
get off of if you do get listed and are adaptive so even if you aren't 
listed by their first level blocks, if you have been listed in the past, 
even if you clean up everything and get delisted from their first level 
blocks, they still tend to mark more mail from you as spam.  And Google 
hides it's junk mail folder so the uninitiated and unwary Gmail user 
doesn't know that there even IS a spam folder.  Many has been the time 
in the past that I have had customers complain that one of their 
corespondents isn't getting mail they send to them, and I check and see 
it's google doing the mail processing, so I send them a bunch of 
screenshots showing how to access the spam folder in the gmail 
interface.  To Google's credit, once 3 or 4 of their customers move mail 
from you out of spam into their inbox, it greatly increases your ranking 
so your mail doesn't go into their spam folder anymore, but if their 
customers don't know there is a spam folder in the first place....

Ted

On 4/25/2026 2:59 PM, Bill Cole wrote:
> On 2026-04-25 at 17:13:16 UTC-0400 (Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:13:16 -0700)
> Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]>
> is rumored to have said:
>
>> Why is this a problem?
>>
>> I understand a number of years ago when Spamhaus decided to charge 
>> they set the former free stuff to report -everything- as spam to 
>> encourage people to stop querying them
>
> THAT NEVER HAPPENED.
>
> If it had, I would be the first person to zero out their SA rules. 
> Such things HAVE been done by others, sometimes intentionally and 
> sometimes accidentally when shutting down. It's a reckless, 
> incompetent, and rude choice that Spamhaus has never made. Spamhaus 
> had some brief glitches of "listing everything" or nearly so on their 
> automated lists but it has been many years since the last such event.
>
> You are likely thinking of some other former DNSBL operator. The 
> TrendMicro version of MAPS may have. SPEWS did it. Gordon Fecyk did it 
> with the list he started after leaving MAPS. NJABL did it. There's a 
> RFC specifying how to NOT do that when shutting down. Spamhaus has had 
> some brief glitches of "listing everything" or nearly so on their 
> automated lists, but it has been many years since the last such accident.
>
> To this day, it is possible for a low-traffic mail server to use the 
> Spamhaus lists without registering or being blocked. You are better 
> off registering for the (often free) data query service to avoid being 
> treated like an anonymous user and it includes data sets that are not 
> part of the free DNSBLs.
>
>> However, I just installed SA - using defaults - and it's not marking 
>> every piece of mail spam.  So I have to conclude that either SA 
>> removed that rule or Spamhaus stopped doing that.
>
> THEY NEVER DID THAT. NEVER.  **YOU ARE SPREADING LIBEL**
>
>
>
>