Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My experience with the RBL has been exclusively negative to date. We used to send out a mailing every couple of weeks, double opt-in and all that jazz. In spite of that there would always be some percentage of clueless people that forgot they'd signed up and that would go all vigilante on us, list us with every known spam blocker and so on. This would lead to password recovery emails not making it through any more (same server), tech support emails being lost and all kinds of other hassles, including direct loss of revenue because paying subscribers could not receive their payment confirmation emails.

In the end we gave up, email is a wonderful medium but if the reliability of the medium is left to people that are well willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater in a well meant but incompetent attempt at improving the situation then you're better off without it.

Blacklists are not the solution to any of these problems without a very rapid and transparent problem resolution process.

Spamhaus is one of the few such institutions that we've never had an issue with.

>My experience with the RBL has been exclusively negative to date.

>a well meant but incompetent attempt at improving the situation

I do not mean to dismiss your frustration, but I wonder if you are comparing the present situation to an unobtainable ideal.

Yes, email worked great in the early 1990s. (E.g., most people who ran the net-news infrastructure demanded that there be a working email address in the From field of every message, and I cannot recall anyone back then disagreeing with that demand.)

But the internet is drastically different now. We cannot just go back to the way it was.

Spam is here to stay. Mostly by virtue of the idiots that continue to buy products that are spamvertised.

Blocking the way the RBL does it is counterproductive, you can't combat spam effectively that way.

Spamhaus has the right idea (block the spam from zombies), the RBL and it's cousins are out of control.

If the battle with spam will ever really be won however it will be by a combination of end user education and legislation that will make it more expensive to send spam than the money you will make on it.

The education part of it will be the larger component, the legislation to mop up the remaining die hards.

To be fair - as the administrator on the receiving end of corporate email infrastructure - I pick and choose which blacklists and methods I'm going to use based on the needs of my users. If a list causes us to lose legitimate email consistently and we can't work with them, or they take up too much time, I won't use it. What we accept in our door is completely up to US, not any outsider.

As for sending email out- sure that's a problem -but we keep ourselves off blacklists (Which you CAN do - you simply avoid email marketing altogether, and stop annoying your users with anything but password resets and things they ask for in realtime - the rest you do through the web).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com