Idiots On All Sides

Here's what's happened.

I have a little server hosted with United Colo. I've had this server for... maybe nine months now, and it has mostly worked fine. It hosts my blog, some other blogs, a web forum, and a few other bits and pieces.

Now, according to SPEWS, the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, United Colo (or their new owners, Sagonet; I don't know and SPEWS don't say) have also been hosting spammers. Repeatedly, say SPEWS. Is this true? I don't know. I suspect it may be so; United Colo and Sagonet host a lot of servers, some of them probably belong (or belonged) to spammers.

So, if United Colo has been hosting spammers and not dealing with them in a timely manner (as SPEWS claim), they have acted irresponsibly. United Colo make money from the Internet, and spammers do nothing but harm to the Net.

So what do SPEWS do? They list the entire /19 subnet belonging to United Colo - 8192 IP addresses - as a spam source. Including me. Me, who hasn't ever sent an unwanted email of any sort. And several hundred other people who are very likely as unfriendly towards spam as I.

So, we have a second example of irresponsible behaviour. SPEWS - knowing full well that most of those IP addresses do not belong to spammers - listed the full set anyway. Whatever inconvenience this causes to the innocent people with addresses in that range is not their problem. Besides, picking out the actual spammers would take work.

And for whatever reason, their web site is basically hosed, and it's almost impossible to get any information out of them.

Now, apart from mu.nu, I have a web and email hosting account with EZ Web Hosting. I've had this one for over a year, and again it's mostly worked fine. Yesterday, though, they decided top start using the anti-spam lists at Osirusoft to filter and reject incoming email. Before, they'd been using it as an input to SpamAssassin, which works extremely well. Not satisfied with this, they decided, without notifying anyone, to start rejecting my own emails to myself.

Numbers three and four in the chain of irresponsibility. SPEWS advises that the list they provide is not necessarily made up only of spammers, but also includes (not may include, does include) people who are just on the same part of the internet as spammers. Osirusoft forwards this list without doing anything to check it, or taking any responsibility for what people do with it. Their website, incidentally, is now coming up with an Apache test page, which is truly encouraging. [Update: No, it's back now. Still deathly slow, though.] This list includes over 32,000 IP addresses belonging to Sagonet. A handful of these actually belong - or belonged - to spammers.

An attempt to use Osirusoft's online utilities results in:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

And to complete the chain, EZ Web Hosting blocks the whole lot. SpamAssassin was working, but just working isn't good enough; we have to actively piss off our customers.

Thanks guys. Thanks to all of you.

(And then there are the charming people who think that mu.nu is a great domain to use for fake email addresses. So I get their spam, and my mail server rejects it, but the spammers are (of course) also using fake email addresses, so the bounces bounce and the error messages from my mail server end up in my inbox with the spam still attached! Aargh! Die! Die the lot of you!

But that's a whole 'nother rant.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:46 PM

Comments

Posted by: Susie at August 10, 2003 12:26 AM (pgVBn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 10, 2003 12:32 AM (MWmir)

Posted by: Tuning Spork at August 10, 2003 03:31 AM (Me3d6)

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