[PW] Subscription disabled? Thank Spamhaus

[John Franklin]

I wasn't going to mention this on the list, but then it occurred to  
me that some people may be wondering what's going on, and this may be  
the best way to make sure everyone knows about it.

Project Wombat's mail server is hosted by a company which also hosts  
many other entities. A number (looks like 2, as far as I can tell  
from the interface) of these other entities have sent out spam. At  
least, they have allegedly done so.

The Spamhaus spam-monitoring service decided, as a result, to mark  
every single IP address which is controlled by the hosting company  
(of which there are several hundred, each one possibly representing  
multiple domain names) as a source of spam. Subscribers whose mail  
servers use Spamhaus have been rejecting messages from Project  
Wombat, and as of yesterday, sufficient rejections have been made  
that subscriptions have been disabled. We are now up to ~90 such  
disabled subscriptions.

This is obviously somewhat problematic. I will, over the course of  
the next few days, try to send a form letter to all the subscribers I  
can track down whose subscriptions have been disabled for this  
reason. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to solve the problem in  
the long term. I do not represent the hosting company, and do not  
even have direct contact with them, so I cannot try to reason with  
Spamhaus. Equally, I suspect that most subscribers are not eager to  
create a new mail account just for Project Wombat.

Quite aside from the fact that Spamhaus has now turned somebody  
else's misbehavior into a massive quantity of work for me, I am not  
terribly thrilled with the whole notion of their service; I still  
remember how, on the basis of a single complaint from a confused  
person with a buggy mail server, Stumpers got shut down. (The person  
complained to Spamcop -- just once -- which threatened to blacklist  
the ISP, which threatened the host, which turned the server right  
off.) The triggering message may conceivably have been real spam,  
this time, but notice that we have nothing to do with it, yet are  
still having to suffer for it.

-John Franklin