[RFCI-Discuss] RBL And remote host

[csmailreport]

On 12/29/07, Alan Brown <alanb at digistar.com> wrote:
> > For instance, SORBS has always listed most of France Telecom's (aka Orange
> > aka Wanadoo) official outbound mail servers IP addresses, so they can't
> > receive legitimate emails from... maybe half of France ?
> So do I and most of Wanadoodoo's network is listed on large DNSBLs as a
> spam source network.

Wanadoo was France Telecom's residential service brand.
Like all residential ranges, what gets out of *.abo.wanadoo.fr towards the rest
of the planet is 99.9999% spam, so blocking residential ranges
(or rDNS *.abo.wanadoo.fr) *is* a good thing.

I was mentioning their "official" outbound MTA IP addresses (smtp*.orange.fr),
which are only blocked by SORBS as far as I know, and have been for years,
and are not a significant source of spam.

[I'm sure you can find a few hours per year during "spam outbreaks" when
they may be somewhat spammy, but that's for every ISP and it doesn't last]

This is only one more case indicating that SORBS is irrelevant and should NEVER
be used to refuse email.

[side note regarding wanadoo.fr aka France Telecom residential service :
they've had a responsive abuse desk for years,
and they have finally started blocking outbound port 25/TCP this year,
so at least they're improving even if it's late]

> They don't care, they're the government telco - and the french govt
> bailed them out to the tune of AT LEAST 67 Billion Euro when they went
> bankrupt 2 years ago. Nice (illegal) subsidies, if you can get 'em....

I don't know where you got this information from -- France Telecom is a cash
cow for the French government and has always payed their bills.

Every time the government needs more money, they either take it from them
or sell a small percentage of shares like 3 to 5 percent a few days ago
to get 4 billion euros to fund French universities.

So you appear seriously misinformed at best -- the money usually flows
in the opposite direction, and that's quite normal since the telephone network
deployment was financed by taxpayers in the second half of the 20th century.

> One of their responses to being DNSBL listed was to buy the hosting
> company and shut the DNSBL down.

After trying to get unlisted on SORBS for months and finally giving up,
Wanadoo discovered that SORBS was partially hosted on their network
in the Netherlands (I think for free, even) -- needless to say when this happens
you ensure that you don't provide free hosting anymore to an abusive blacklist
that tries to racket you only to relist you right away.

> There have been threats made against various other DNSBLs.

Only SORBS appears to be a recurrent problem, and for many people.
Dmitry Rybin appears to be the latest to join the club...

Anyway this discussion is outside the scope of this mailing list, and as I mentioned
in my previous email, the irrelevancy of SORBS is already taken care of by
SpamAssassin's almost-zero scoring for this blacklist:

SA's genetic algorithm automatically computes the relevancy of relationships, such as

blacklisted on SORBS <-> sends spam
blacklisted on SpamHaus.org <-> sends spam
blacklisted on RFCI <-> sends spam

as the results are obvious with SORBS almost-zero scoring.

Even indirect spam criteria (such as RFCI listing, which is not directly related to spamminess) proves more reliable than SORBS pretending an IP is spamming.