[thelist] {Spam?} OT: Osirusoft spam list dead

Dougal Campbell dougal at gunters.org
Thu Aug 28 09:12:59 CDT 2003


On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, muinar wrote:

> At 03:27 28.08.03, you wrote:
> >Hmmm,
> >
> > > Osirusoft, is dead due to dDOS attacks:
> > >
> > >  http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/27/0214238.shtml?tid=111&tid=126
> >
> >AOL recently started rejecting email from one, but not all, of my
> >addresses.  I wonder if this could be related...
>
> I wonder why 'Servers using these lists are currently rejecting ALL
> email' like mentioned in above article - Are spam detection services
> really set up as bad as that?

Not all. But some are. My server uses SpamAssassin to tag suspected
spam, and I use the SpamBouncer procmail rules, plus my own set of
whitelist rules, to categorize messages. When the Osirusoft rbls went
down, a *lot* of my incoming mail started getting tagged as spam.
Fortunately, my whitelists kept things from getting chaotic.

Also, fortunately, SpamAssassin uses multiple rules in a scoring system
to decide the "spamminess" of a message. But some systems will send
messages to the spam-can on the basis of a single test. Not good.

I can't say I'm happy with the way the Osirusoft maintainers handled
this, either. They set their servers to return '127.0.0.2' for all
lookups, which is the return value given server is considered a spam
source. They should have either configured it to return '127.0.0.1', or
just shut it down in whatever state it was at the time.

-- 
Ernest MacDougal Campbell III, MCP+I, MCSE <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/             http://spam.gunters.org/
  Web Design & Development:  http://www.mentalcollective.com/
       This message is guaranteed to be 100% eror frea!


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