[PW] Another Mail Delivery Problem (via spamhaus)

[John Franklin]

Some of you may have failed to receive mail recently from the list.  
This is because the blackhole listing at http://www.spamhaus.org/  
briefly included the entire block of addresses owned by the people  
who physically host lists.project-wombat.org. The issue has  
apparently been resolved.

I have no idea why spamhaus decided to blacklist all those addresses;  
a message I received suggested that one of the companies who is  
hosted by that company may have been misbehaving, and spamhaus chose  
to block the entire hosting company instead of merely the servers  
used by the actual spammers.

A similar incident occurred back at Stumpers. Someone in China who  
was subscribed to an experimental Linux mailing list received, as a  
result of faulty mail server software, a garbled message which was  
partially a message from the Linux list and partially a message from  
Stumpers. This person didn't have enough English skill to decipher  
the message, or enough patience to actually look at the list  
information, and reported the message as spam to a certain spam- 
monitoring service. On the strength of that one complaint, and  
without investigating, the service decided that all mail from the  
entire domain (which was, of course, a school) must be spam. The  
school's service provider threatened to cut off the school's Internet  
connection unless the "spam" was stopped, once again without  
investigating, and that's why we had one of our weird little outages.  
When I suggested that the service (*cough* Spamcop *cough*) had been  
irresponsible for declaring the entire domain tainted over one  
complaint, I received an irate message from someone informing me that  
Spamco-- er, the service in question -- was the greatest thing since  
sliced bread, that it was owned by God and administered by a flock of  
angels and never under any circumstances made a mistake, and that I  
was a fool and a villain for criticizing them.

So I won't say what I think of these services. Someone might take  
offense if I used words like "irresponsible," "overblown," or  
"useless." I'm afraid you'll have to infer if you want my opinion.

Meanwhile, I know that there are at least 20 people (from status  
messages sent by the server) who have had problems, and possibly a  
few who have been unsubscribed because of repeated bounces. My  
profound apologies to anyone who has been effected; please contact me  
if there are any further problems.

-John Franklin
"For large carnivores, eating human beings must be our equivalent of  
eating Spam"
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