A Good Example of the Stupidity of Black Hole Lists

Declan McCullagh offers an excellent example of the sheer stupidity of e-mail blackhole lists.

McCullagh received a resume spam and reported the spammer to both Yahoo!, who the spammer was using to spam his resume, as well as to Spam Cop.

The spammer, in turn, reported McCullagh as a spammer to Spam Cop and to Relays.Osirusoft.Com. Spam Cop realized the report was bogus and took action against the spammer, but the good folks at OsiruSoft simply added McCullagh’s mail server to its open relay list without even a minimal investigation, causing many subscribers to his widely read list to miss some of his postings. As McCullagh puts it,

The Politech mail server is no longer listed, but a policy of add-first-and-check-later raises troubling questions about how reliable blacklists can be. I like the concept in theory, but in practice they seem to be far more problematic than smart perhaps eventually collaborative) end-user filtering.

I’d be a bit more blunt. It doesn’t “raise troubling questions,” the blacklisting practice is just plain stupid. I’m surprised more people haven’t tried to manipulate it like this clever (but vile) spammer did.

Leave a Reply