I began to wonder if I was spamming . . .

since I posted this message to 3 different boards, so I decided against posting it further.

Then I downloaded ehotsheet. . .

Read on.
*******
I posted this in answer to a question posted on another board. The poster wanted to know if blocking spam by ISPs was pre-censorship, and whether the spam thing was over-hyped.
*****

The answer to both questions, IMHO, depends on "whose ox is being gored."

If you're a spammer, it's a bad thing.
If you're an ISP, it's an expensive thing.
If you're in business, it's a "bottom line" kind of situation.

I've been doing some digging today, and have learned that it's not so much "filtering," which might be construed (big stretch, BTW) as censorship, as "blocking."

There are service providers who do nothing to kick people off their networks who are open, known spammers. They get blocked.

There are providers who host people/businesses that sell spam tools - email harvesters, 'bots, etc. They get blocked.

There are entire countries where misconfigured or badly configured email servers allow spammers the world over to send mail, all the while protecting themselves from discovery. Most often blocked are China and Korea.

And there's another facet to the story of whose mail gets where:

I recently turned on the DNS checking option in Mailwasher, and was/am surprised at the number of legitimate ezines to which I subscribe that were shown as "origin blacklisted." And Mailwasher is configured (by default) to check only 3 Blacklists.

Unfortunately, it doesn't tell which list, so the reason for the listing can't be surmised.

Legitimate mailers might do well to send their messages to themselves first, and receive it with mailwasher to ascertain whether or not the service provider they are using is listed on one of the Blacklists.

This needs to be done only once for each service provider. Then, they can try to come to some solution with them.

(ehotsheet was marked blacklisted . . . I overrode that and put it on my 'friends' list.)

Hi Mary,

> (ehotsheet was marked blacklisted . . . I
> overrode that and put it on my 'friends'
> list.)

I'm surprised that the Entrepreneur's Hotsheet was marked as "blacklisted".... It is sent directly from Sowpub.com. It is double opt-in (to make sure that everyone who gets it really wants it)....

The only other free ezine from Sowpub.com is the SeedZine, which is double opt-in as well. Every issue of every ezine contains information how to unsubscribe. So this is a real puzzle to me....

Hmmm....

- Dien Rice

It's probably your upstream provider, or even further up the line.

Remember, these lists are blocking providers based on their hosting spammers, purveyors(sp?) of spam tools, and countries.

Kinda like being considered a suspect no matter how law abiding you are 'cause you live in a bad neighborhood. :^>

The three lists that are configured are these:

relays.ordb.org
relays.visi.com
bl.spamcop.net

The first two block open relay servers, while spamcop looks at blacklisted servers.

I've just noticed that Robert Allen's newsletter is blacklisted, too. Neil Shearing, Phil Wiley, and others have shown up.

Now, I read somewhere this morning that ORDB was shut down. Then I remember skimming an article that talked about email being blocked when they accessed the defunct ORDB.

It didn't mean much at the time - I was skimming for something else.

If ORDB is gone - I kept seeing references to it, even after reading someplace that it was offline - it could mean that there are false positives being reported.

Sigh. I wish I'd paid more attention, now. I'll see if I can backtrack to the specific page where the problem of it (ORDB) being shut down was mentioned. Then, I'll try to discover for sure if it's really gone.

In any event, the whole blacklisting thing is and will cause more and more problems for legitimate mailers, as ISPs employ knee-jerk solutions to the spam problem.

The trouble with blacklisting is that its a little like "throwing the baby out with the bath water." Any broad-based solution is bound to trap the good guys, too.

I'll let you know what I come up with. Meanwhile, you might contact your host to see what's what.

Mary

My server will be called xxxxx.com. (I'm not ready to reveal it yet, and it isn't up anyway.) Now suppose that my internet service - the pipe itself - is from swbell.net. If swbell.net get's itself on one of the blacklists because Joe Spammer has gotten trapped, my server could be blacklisted as well.

Some well known names I remember seeing in a few of the news.admin.abuse discussions today included uu.net (I might've left out a 'uu' or two - it's a dumb name) and AT&T. Qwest was mentioned, as was ozemail. (Ha! I bet THAT's why Phil Wiley's ezine was listed.)

Mary
(I'll be glad when my obsessive/compulsive curiosity takes me to stuff I can package and sell . . . )

DUH! I just noticed that the status field where the blacklisting is shown is "rollover" enabled. Robert Allen's newsletter is blacklisted by spamcop.

Send me another ehotsheet, and I'll tell you which one got you. (Save you and me some hunting.)

Get rid of the obvious in my email . . .

Marye

Hi Mary,

Thanks for all your detective work.... I'll send you another email for testing purposes....

Thanks again!

- Dien

I've gotten your message, but it's arriving ok. That leads me to suspect spamcop.

I need a re-transmission of ehotsheet, itself.

Mary

> I've gotten your message, but it's arriving
> ok. That leads me to suspect spamcop.

> I need a re-transmission of ehotsheet,
> itself.

Hi Mary,

I sent out an email to you from Sowpub.com - this should be identical to the Entrepreneur's Hotsheet you received earlier today....

Thanks again for all your help!

- Dien