>I was happy to see Kary's rant on anti-spam fanaticism.  I used to be
>one myself, till one day our local spam policeman said to me, "Well,
>Russ, is it really such a big problem?  Compare it to hard spam --
>junk mail -- which you actually have to pick up, take to the recycle
>bin, get to the recycyler, and which pollutes the environment as it's
>created and as it's destroyed.  With electronic junk mail, you hit
><delete> and that's it."
>
>He's right, you know.  Even without considering this:

Damned right he's right! :)

>
>> I believe too many ISP's have allowed spammers to drive them into
>> sleeping with the devil; I know that the problems this site
>> experiences due to bogus spam filters (eg: null return-path) and
>> blacklisting "mistakes" are orders of magnitude worse than any
>> service impairments caused by spammers.

While I agree in principle with ORBS somewhat draconian approach to
fixing open relays, the thing that really ticked me off with their
original pronouncement against our site was the message under which
we're listed

"listserv.uoguelph.ca - direct spam source (broken list management).
hitting ORBS traps. (27 December 2000)"

        'broken list management'...right
        'direct spam source' ... right right

They feel that Listserv mail coming to a non-existant subscriber which
happens to have been resurrected as an ORBS trap constitutes "SPAM", and
as such our entire machine gets sent to the doghouse.

If the admin at the site in question took the time to contact our
postmaster we would have resolved the problem quickly and to their
satisfaction. The people who run ORBS don't seem to realise that

1. Auto-deletion on Listserv is very good but not perfect, and coupled
with
2. Lazy list owners automatically deleting their Listserv mail every
morning

will result in stale addresses dropping through the cracks.

The fact they don't seem to want to explain the criteria they used for
determining that this is a "direct spam source" indicates to me they are
more than a little unfamiliar with the way Listserv works and can't be
bothered or are unwilling to find out.

I guess we will have to start forcing list owners to be more proactive
and introduce active and passive probing for all our lists.

Scotty
--
Steve Howie
University of Guelph,
Guelph, Ontario CANADA
"If it's not Scottish - it's C-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-P!!"