Re: Am I right to blame SORBS?

William Francis said on Wednesday, April 06, 2011 :
<snip> 
> " Let me quote Alden Bates: QUOTE
> SORBS is basically the spam-fighting equivalent of hanging all your
> suspects just to make sure you get the criminal "
> 
It is true that sorbs could improve on its very old free service to the
world and much of the negativity around sorbs is because sorbs is 
an unforgiving system where your mail server is blocked if it relays spam.
sorbs also blocks entire ip ranges where those responsable do not respond to
abuse requests. I do not advocate blocking because you are relaying 
spam, but I do advocate that those that run mail servers be responsable
for whatever they are relaying if they are notified of abuse and that they 
then at least respond and cease such behaviour. Of course there are 
a myriad of anti spam solutions out there and many poitical and business
reasons for people to speak out against the strictness of sorbs as well
as legit reasons (for being too strict) but I deny that sorbs has 'false 
positives' as it just is not possible. What is possible is that a Google
server has relayed bulk unsolicited emails and that Google is not doing
anything about delisting at sorbs, as you rightly proved in your quotes,
sorbs is quite an unforgiving system but then again, it is relatively easy
to unlist the first time, it becomes problematic if you are guilty of sending
spam regularly and yes of course, you may even have to start paying
for delisting. Then again you should not be hosting spammers.

I guess it is a philisophical thing:
The University of Cape town teaches that email is an advertising
tool and it is perfectly acceptable to send out one marketing/advert to
anyone.

I firmly believe that email is a communication tool and has nothing to do
with marketing at all under ANY circumstances it is not okay to send out
bulk unsolicited email.

Businesses (read ISP) will not like sorbs as you do host spammers
from time to time and you do send out their marketing/advertising as it is
perfectly acceptable to do so and systems like sorbs will not like you and
will list you, regularly and it will become an impossible mission to delist
if you have multiple/regular spam complaints.



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