bjoernvold.com

SORBS also lists servers with dynamically allocated IP addresses.

me wrote:I would find it hard to imagine that anyone would be able to read this text and not know what email is. I would also find it hard to imagine that someone could know what email is and be unaware of what spam is. So, by that logic, I assume that you (the reader) know what spam is, and further… I assume that you know it is bad.

Now, there are many ways to try and detect spam (for likely removal, deletion or retaliation). One common way is by using DNSBLs, which are basically lists of "bad addresses" that are typically accessible to the Internet at large. People who administer email servers can tell their email servers to check with certain blacklists and flag or delete messages that appear to come from these bad addresses. The fact that these lists exists is good.

However, the people who maintain such lists need to provide a "reasonable" means for people to have themselves removed from the list, if they are legitimate mail senders. Some do. SORBS however requires that you sign up for an account with them if you wish to delist yourself. This would be okay… if it worked properly. I tried to sign up for an account but the confirmation email never arrived, and since I am listed, I can't email them to tell them that it never arrived. So I tried again with a different email address. This time the confirmation email arrived and told me to click a link (you know, to PROOVE that I really own that email address). The concept of forcing me to prove I own the address is great, but when I clicked the link it told me that it couldn't create a support account for me because " isn't an appropriate character for the 'country' field. that's funny, I don't remember typing a double quote there, I thought I typed Canada in that box. It appears an account was created anyways, but when I tried to delist myself it tells me that it failed and that I must use a special tool to delist myself. I think they just wanted to find a subtle way to call me a tool.

Right now the tool is failing to delist me because our Internet provider screwed up the rDNS entries and now the hostname doesn't match. I put in a call to them to fix it yesterday but they didn't get to it until "after hours" and I got a message saying they would submit the ticket and do it today. So this morning I asked for a status update and got no reply. So this afternoon I phoned and they did it while I was on the phone (the process takes about 60 seconds). So now I have to wait for SORBS to stop caching the old entries so I can delist myself (if that in fact works at all).

So, in case you were unable to grasp what I meant by that… I am in favour of what SORBS does, just not the slackass way in which they do it. I should also mention that the slackass way in which our provider deals with support requests is just as painful.