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Not everyone can spend $500 on lawyer billable hours per SMTP destination multiplied by N number of destinations. I also think that the likelihood of success i

Not everyone can spend $500 on lawyer billable hours per SMTP destination multiplied by N number of destinations. I also think that the likelihood of success in sending legal threats to somebody that demand they accept your SMTP traffic will not stand up in court, if you ever escalated it that far. As somebody who runs postfix MX on the receiving side of things, I can guarantee you that the day I receive a legal threat from some unknown third party with which I don't have a pre-existing business/contract relationship, demanding that I accept their email, is the day that I blacklist their entire organization and tell them "okay, I'll await service of your statement of claim". You actually think that the best answer to a network engineering problem is to make legal threats at third party ISPs? Companies with which you don't have a signed service order contract and/or master services agreement? You say you're a mid sized company. I think you're running a huge legal risk of angering a Comcast or AT&T size entity that has much deeper pockets and legal resources than you. The day that one of those giants calls you out on your bluff is going to be very expensive. On an ISP-to-ISP relationship level, this is not how you solve SMTP flow traffic problems. I can tell you that if I went to a NANOG conference representing my AS and proudly told other people "oh yeah, we've started sending threats from our lawyers to $OTHERISP1 and $OTHERISP2 because they won't take our mail traffic", that I would quickly be treated as a pariah.

mhh__ 5y ago
Could you get a lawyer to draft you one template that looks scary while also not leading to much follow up unless you really want to be whitelisted by that particular entity?
CPLX 5y ago
He didn’t say threaten them. It’s pretty easy to envision a situation where a lawyer sends a quite friendly and factual email to a company, that is literally identical to the one the IT head would have sent, but because it’s coming from a lawyer the recipient uses completely different internal routing to process the request. So someone actually takes the request seriously. Seems both plausible and a reasonable thing to do for a company large enough to have a legal department. People pay attention to lawyer letters. You’ve pretty much confirmed as much by noting that letters from a lawyer are so concerning to you that the mere mention of one makes you assume it’s a threat. If you got a letter from an attorney asking for something nicely, and it was a reasonable request you would automatically reply “SUE ME” just on principle? What’s the principle?
- walrus01 5y ago
  In the American legal system, if somebody spends the money to take the time to have their lawyer hand craft and send me a letter about something such as this, I'm going to take it as a threat whether or not it specifically contains one. The implication is that if you do not do whatever is demanded in the letter, the next step will be the client of said lawyer escalating the situation to paying their lawyer to actually sue you.
  - jahewson 5y ago
    Yes that’s the idea. They’ve spent a bit of money to make a sincere and well-founded request that will cause you to consult your own lawyer who will explain to you why you’re probably doing something wrong and need to do what the letter asks of you. Of course there’s a lot of garbage out there too.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    I mean, not really. In the world of companies talking to other companies lawyers are involved all the time. In some scenarios (real estate transactions, or M&A, for example) it would just be completely routine for two companies on exceedingly good terms to communicate back and forth via attorneys. Your main premise seems to be that the recipient should take all this very personally. But it’s not personal, these are businesses, discussing a business related topic. The VAST majority of business to business communications that involve attorneys don’t go anywhere near an actual filed lawsuit.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      An intentionally initiated transaction where everyone already knows each other, and knows in advance that lawyers will be involved (as you say, m&a, real estate, etc) is a very different thing than receiving a demand letter from a previously unknown party out of the blue. Like I said in my original reply here, we are talking about sending threats to third-party isps, with which the originator of the smtp traffic has no existing business or contractual relationship.
superasn 5y ago
So what's the advice for an avg Joe for getting a reply from ATT, Comcast, etc when they unjustly blacklist you and ignore all correspondence?
- walrus01 5y ago
  1. Host your mx somewhere that isn't on any blacklists. This means a small to medium sized isp, where you can directly contact the people who run the core network operations there, and who truly do care about kicking off abusive other customers very quickly. Ideally I would go with an ISP in your own region and home business area. Best chances of success if it's a hosting ISP where random customers cannot sign up online with just a name and a credit card, but it's more of a "contact us for a custom price quotation for your colocation needs" type of hosting operation. 2. Possibly run all your outbound smtp through a trusted third party service that you pay for such relay. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth but that's where we are at in 2022. 3. Be absolutely certain that your own smtp, spf, dkim, dmarc configuration is flawless and you've never been a source of spam.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    Host your mx somewhere that isn't on any blacklists. This means a small to medium sized isp, where you can directly contact the people who run the core network operations there, and who truly do care about kicking off abusive other customers very quickly. Ideally I would go with an ISP in your own region and home business area. That's a nice idea. In fact, it's what my businesses have done for years. I have personally met several of the senior staff at the service I use and I know that they are both technically excellent and very serious about preventing abuse on their network. We haven't been able to deliver mails to customers at certain mail services for years. 100% blackholed every time. And it's the same usual suspects that others have mentioned in this very discussion. The problem is that the hosting service we use has many customers. Occasionally one of those customers makes a mistake and one of their systems gets compromised for a short time, until they or the hosting service detects the unusual traffic and intervenes. And that's enough to get someone's IP block on a blacklist it will evidently never leave. This is of course absolutely no different to any hosting service like AWS or Azure, except that no-one is going to blanket block all servers from an organisation of that scale even though the exact same problems happen there too.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
The rationale for involving legal is to place some accountability and consequences where they belong. Currently, countless people essentially commit countless abuses for free because the actor is hidden behind a machine or a process. But somewhere it's a humans decision to institute an abusive protocol, and it seems pretty fair fo me to make that human accountable for their action. Not just email but all kinds of things. You are probably merely a dick but still a legal dick if you wantonly block email for yourself. But the second you are responsible for even one other person's correspondence reaching them, I say you should be legally culpable for any failure to deliver.
- walrus01 5y ago
  I'm a dick? I question whether you or what other percentage of the commenters in this thread represent any specific ASN with its own IP space that it cares about keeping clean, and have bgp relationships with other ISPs. Or whether they're actually end users only. Have you actually encountered this problem as a service provider in the past and implemented solutions to it, or are you just sharing your opinion as a possibly-frustrated end user of email?
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    I avoided the problem by only ever sending email on behalf of customers, not receiving. IE, saas app can send out quotes and invoices and things but any replies go to the end users own address not any of our servers, and didn't host our own email. What I didn't do was ignore the problem or think there was no problem. Things still got blocked elsewhere but I (personally or my company) didn't do it. I recognized that handling someone elses correspondence is a non-trivial responsibility. Yes the job is hard, and so you either decide that is your whole job, or you outsource it to someone whos whole job it is. You don't just do a poor job because it's hard and not your all day every day job.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > I say you should be legally culpable for any failure to deliver. So you think an MSP's advertised policy should be "We guarantee that anything sent to you will be delivered, including spam"? That no MSP should provide spam-filtering, at risk of legal culpability? If that's not what you mean, then presumably you are requiring all MSPs to block only spam, and to deliver all legitimate email. But that is impossible, because nobody has figured out a way of reliably distinguishing spam from ham. If I received such a letter from your legal department, I would laugh, and reply: "I am awaiting your writ." If I got the note from a recipient or their postmaster, I'd be much more inclined to try to help, but I never try to negotiate with lawyers brandishing threats.
viraptor 5y ago
> Not everyone can spend $500 on lawyer billable hours per SMTP destination multiplied by N number of destinations. You likely wouldn't do that - just get a template version that gets reused, just like you pay once for a contract / t&c you reuse with multiple parties.
jart 5y ago
Did you read the whole article? The OP wasn't being blacklisted by an operator. He was being blacklisted by a company that charges you a $25/month fee to not be blacklisted by lazy operators who program their systems to curl their for-profit blacklist.
- walrus01 5y ago
  People have been making legal threats at, and trying to sue, RBL operators since 1997 or so. It's a well known thing. All I say is "good luck" if you think legally threatening a maintainer of a list of IP CIDR prefixes that are used by a third party is going to solve your problems. It hasn't worked for the last 25 years and I don't see how it'll start working now.
  - jart 5y ago
    No I think the solution is to not get a $5/month vps and expect it to have a good reputation. Maybe if you went with the $100/month hosting provider you wouldn't have needed to spend $500/month on legal threats. Internet addresses aren't fungible. It's a well known concept in telecommunications. One of the reasons why people have always paid a lot more money to have 212 numbers versus 646 numbers. It's the reason why if you want to set up a respectable business, you don't rent property in a high crime neighborhood. Browsers and email clients should ideally have more transparency about the ASNs and service providers who host the websites that people are visiting, so that everyone can develop a mental model of which ones are associated with good things, because right now the only people who are able to have any kind of awareness of this thing are operators who regularly monitor traffic.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      This is completely valid, but if you go hunting for an IP block that has never been used for spam at this point you're going to be looking for a long time. It should not be the #1 consideration when choosing a hosting provider just because someone abused their IP block in the past (possibly before they even owned it). In any case, trying to run mail off a VPS would be stupid and that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying we don't all need to capitulate to paying Amazon or Google to forward our outbound mail, and it would be better if we did not, even considering the struggles attached to bucking the trend.
bryans 5y ago
You have this all backward. > You actually think that the best answer to a network engineering problem is to make legal threats at third party ISPs? It's not a "network engineering problem" if administrators and managers are the ones making the decisions to provide no reasonable recourse for a ban, on top of actively ignoring or denying legitimate requests for removal. If the third party hasn't broken any rules, then the only resort is getting attorneys involved, because there are literally no other options if the provider refuses to act in good faith. > Companies with which you don't have a signed service order contract and/or master services agreement? If you are providing an email service and your customers are not receiving the emails they're expecting, all because you refused to acknowledge a removal request, then it shouldn't matter if you have a relationship with the third party. You've failed your own customers, and for no legitimate, logical or even conceivable reason, other than to assert some personal dominance over another group of engineers that you see as "lesser." None of this is an engineering problem. It's an asshole problem.
- walrus01 5y ago
  > If you are providing an email service and your customers are not receiving the emails they're expecting, all because you refused to acknowledge a removal request, And on this I concur with you, because if the sender of the email is actually sending spam and has ended up on some smtp-receiving deny lists for well founded reasons, they are indeed failing their customers. Failing them through their own lack of procedure and policy, such as not having a click to remove link in the mail, and not removing addresses/putting addresses into a scrub-before-sending list. If that is the case, they have nobody to blame but themselves for that and should not be sending legal demands to other peoples' ISPs such as at&t or Comcast.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    You're assuming facts not in evidence, such as that we don't have policies for unsubscribing, or that we're sending spam in the first place. To be clear, we've never complained to anyone except on behalf of customers who complained to us that they weren't getting our mail.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
oarsinsync 5y ago
> You actually think that the best answer to a network engineering problem is to make legal threats at third party ISPs? If the remote mailserver is explicitly bouncing your mails, it's not a network engineering problem. If you're able to complete a TCP 3 way handshake, it's not a network engineering problem. If you're being prevented from completing a TCP 3 way handshake because of a filter list on the MX server, it's not a network engineering problem. Admittedly, you can't tell that one without asking a network engineer (on the remote network) to validate that for you, or asking the application owner to advise. Contrary to popular advice (thanks MSFT), you probably shouldn't contact your network administrator. We probably have priv 15, but we dont necessarily have root.
noduerme 5y ago
>> per SMTP destination multiplied by N number of destinations The number of people using anything other than google, apple, microsoft or yahoo for personal email these days is vanishingly small; and of the remainder, almost all of them are on major broadband providers. If you were some local ISP blocking us, that wouldn't be worth the trouble of sending a legal letter. I'd just tell that particular customer to contact you and ask why you weren't delivering our mail. This only leaves other corporations that provide their own mail services to people who work there, and if those people want to get their mail they can call IT.
znpy 5y ago
A decent company and big enough already has at least one lawyer on payroll, so no need to be billed the additional 500$/hour
luser007 5y ago
Tangentially related: Somebody created a github containing domains he thought should be blocked: https://github.com/chadmayfield/my-pihole-blocklists https://github.com/chadmayfield/my-pihole-blocklists A year later I bought a domain that had expired under my country TLD. It turns out that domain for some reason was previously added to that list. Now, as you can see, the man behind that Github repo has decided to archive that repo and therefore make it read only. As you can tell from both pull requests and issues on that repo, people has asked him to remote legitimate domains (e.g. *.urbandictionary.com). But those calls remain unanswered. It is fruitless to contact the author. So this random dude causes real problems for legitimate business and individuals and we should just accept it? Obviously he doesn't act on friendly geek requests. It seems lawyering up would be the only recourse in this situation. I find it analogous to somebody standing on a soap box in a village and announcing: "Don't trust James. Don't trust Mary either. There's problems with Charles" and James, Mary, and Charles have no way of stopping his libel. I don't have the funds for legal action, but it is obviously wrong that he can announce "these domains are bad" and offer no way of fixing mistakes. He should take down the repo, but oh that sweet sweet Github karma probably discourages him from doing so.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > I find it analogous to somebody standing on a soap box in a village and announcing: "Don't trust James. Don't trust Mary either. You're speaking of some random domain-list on github - that isn't even maintained? Taken from someone's private pihole? Anyone using a list of that kind to block is simply incompetent. Even as part of a scoring system, it's pretty silly. Before adding a blocklist, a postmaster needs to familiarize herself with the list's policies. Are list entries aged-out? How quickly? Do they use spamtraps, or user-reports? Or is it just the whim of the list-maintainer? Do they block individual addresses, whole domains, or entire allocations? > So this random dude causes real problems for legitimate business and individuals and we should just accept it? So you're having problems sending mail to a domain where the postmaster cares more about rejecting spam than she does about receiving legitimate email. That's a matter for your recipient to take up with their MSP. And if the recipient wants to receive mail from small-time domains, they need to accept that they're going to receive some spam as well; but maybe they need to switch to an MSP that only rejects on strong evidence. My point is that it's your recipient's choice to use an MSP that blocks using some crazy list they found on github. Some postmasters will block everything from selected countries; at one time I would block everything from Romania, because none of my users had correspondents in Romania, and email from Romania at that time was 100% spam. But I wasn't providing service to the public. I knew all my users. Different MTAs have different users, and different patterns of abusive email. So if you want to use a custom blocklist, make your own, based on your own incoming spam (and then you can honour removal requests yourself). Otherwise use a public blocklist, based on multiple spamtraps in multiple ISPs. So yes, you should just accept it. You don't have a right to have mail delivered by any MSP you send to; they're private organisations or individuals, and they're entitled to determine what their own policies are. In the world of email, nobody is entitled to protection from the foolishness of others.

mhh__ 5y ago

Could you get a lawyer to draft you one template that looks scary while also not leading to much follow up unless you really want to be whitelisted by that particular entity?

CPLX 5y ago

He didn’t say threaten them. It’s pretty easy to envision a situation where a lawyer sends a quite friendly and factual email to a company, that is literally identical to the one the IT head would have sent, but because it’s coming from a lawyer the recipient uses completely different internal routing to process the request. So someone actually takes the request seriously. Seems both plausible and a reasonable thing to do for a company large enough to have a legal department. People pay attention to lawyer letters. You’ve pretty much confirmed as much by noting that letters from a lawyer are so concerning to you that the mere mention of one makes you assume it’s a threat. If you got a letter from an attorney asking for something nicely, and it was a reasonable request you would automatically reply “SUE ME” just on principle? What’s the principle?

walrus01 5y ago
In the American legal system, if somebody spends the money to take the time to have their lawyer hand craft and send me a letter about something such as this, I'm going to take it as a threat whether or not it specifically contains one. The implication is that if you do not do whatever is demanded in the letter, the next step will be the client of said lawyer escalating the situation to paying their lawyer to actually sue you.
- jahewson 5y ago
  Yes that’s the idea. They’ve spent a bit of money to make a sincere and well-founded request that will cause you to consult your own lawyer who will explain to you why you’re probably doing something wrong and need to do what the letter asks of you. Of course there’s a lot of garbage out there too.
- CPLX 5y ago
  I mean, not really. In the world of companies talking to other companies lawyers are involved all the time. In some scenarios (real estate transactions, or M&A, for example) it would just be completely routine for two companies on exceedingly good terms to communicate back and forth via attorneys. Your main premise seems to be that the recipient should take all this very personally. But it’s not personal, these are businesses, discussing a business related topic. The VAST majority of business to business communications that involve attorneys don’t go anywhere near an actual filed lawsuit.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    An intentionally initiated transaction where everyone already knows each other, and knows in advance that lawyers will be involved (as you say, m&a, real estate, etc) is a very different thing than receiving a demand letter from a previously unknown party out of the blue. Like I said in my original reply here, we are talking about sending threats to third-party isps, with which the originator of the smtp traffic has no existing business or contractual relationship.

superasn 5y ago

So what's the advice for an avg Joe for getting a reply from ATT, Comcast, etc when they unjustly blacklist you and ignore all correspondence?

walrus01 5y ago
1. Host your mx somewhere that isn't on any blacklists. This means a small to medium sized isp, where you can directly contact the people who run the core network operations there, and who truly do care about kicking off abusive other customers very quickly. Ideally I would go with an ISP in your own region and home business area. Best chances of success if it's a hosting ISP where random customers cannot sign up online with just a name and a credit card, but it's more of a "contact us for a custom price quotation for your colocation needs" type of hosting operation. 2. Possibly run all your outbound smtp through a trusted third party service that you pay for such relay. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth but that's where we are at in 2022. 3. Be absolutely certain that your own smtp, spf, dkim, dmarc configuration is flawless and you've never been a source of spam.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  Host your mx somewhere that isn't on any blacklists. This means a small to medium sized isp, where you can directly contact the people who run the core network operations there, and who truly do care about kicking off abusive other customers very quickly. Ideally I would go with an ISP in your own region and home business area. That's a nice idea. In fact, it's what my businesses have done for years. I have personally met several of the senior staff at the service I use and I know that they are both technically excellent and very serious about preventing abuse on their network. We haven't been able to deliver mails to customers at certain mail services for years. 100% blackholed every time. And it's the same usual suspects that others have mentioned in this very discussion. The problem is that the hosting service we use has many customers. Occasionally one of those customers makes a mistake and one of their systems gets compromised for a short time, until they or the hosting service detects the unusual traffic and intervenes. And that's enough to get someone's IP block on a blacklist it will evidently never leave. This is of course absolutely no different to any hosting service like AWS or Azure, except that no-one is going to blanket block all servers from an organisation of that scale even though the exact same problems happen there too.

Brian_K_White 5y ago

The rationale for involving legal is to place some accountability and consequences where they belong. Currently, countless people essentially commit countless abuses for free because the actor is hidden behind a machine or a process. But somewhere it's a humans decision to institute an abusive protocol, and it seems pretty fair fo me to make that human accountable for their action. Not just email but all kinds of things. You are probably merely a dick but still a legal dick if you wantonly block email for yourself. But the second you are responsible for even one other person's correspondence reaching them, I say you should be legally culpable for any failure to deliver.

walrus01 5y ago
I'm a dick? I question whether you or what other percentage of the commenters in this thread represent any specific ASN with its own IP space that it cares about keeping clean, and have bgp relationships with other ISPs. Or whether they're actually end users only. Have you actually encountered this problem as a service provider in the past and implemented solutions to it, or are you just sharing your opinion as a possibly-frustrated end user of email?
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  I avoided the problem by only ever sending email on behalf of customers, not receiving. IE, saas app can send out quotes and invoices and things but any replies go to the end users own address not any of our servers, and didn't host our own email. What I didn't do was ignore the problem or think there was no problem. Things still got blocked elsewhere but I (personally or my company) didn't do it. I recognized that handling someone elses correspondence is a non-trivial responsibility. Yes the job is hard, and so you either decide that is your whole job, or you outsource it to someone whos whole job it is. You don't just do a poor job because it's hard and not your all day every day job.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> I say you should be legally culpable for any failure to deliver. So you think an MSP's advertised policy should be "We guarantee that anything sent to you will be delivered, including spam"? That no MSP should provide spam-filtering, at risk of legal culpability? If that's not what you mean, then presumably you are requiring all MSPs to block only spam, and to deliver all legitimate email. But that is impossible, because nobody has figured out a way of reliably distinguishing spam from ham. If I received such a letter from your legal department, I would laugh, and reply: "I am awaiting your writ." If I got the note from a recipient or their postmaster, I'd be much more inclined to try to help, but I never try to negotiate with lawyers brandishing threats.

viraptor 5y ago

> Not everyone can spend $500 on lawyer billable hours per SMTP destination multiplied by N number of destinations. You likely wouldn't do that - just get a template version that gets reused, just like you pay once for a contract / t&c you reuse with multiple parties.

jart 5y ago

Did you read the whole article? The OP wasn't being blacklisted by an operator. He was being blacklisted by a company that charges you a $25/month fee to not be blacklisted by lazy operators who program their systems to curl their for-profit blacklist.

walrus01 5y ago
People have been making legal threats at, and trying to sue, RBL operators since 1997 or so. It's a well known thing. All I say is "good luck" if you think legally threatening a maintainer of a list of IP CIDR prefixes that are used by a third party is going to solve your problems. It hasn't worked for the last 25 years and I don't see how it'll start working now.
- jart 5y ago
  No I think the solution is to not get a $5/month vps and expect it to have a good reputation. Maybe if you went with the $100/month hosting provider you wouldn't have needed to spend $500/month on legal threats. Internet addresses aren't fungible. It's a well known concept in telecommunications. One of the reasons why people have always paid a lot more money to have 212 numbers versus 646 numbers. It's the reason why if you want to set up a respectable business, you don't rent property in a high crime neighborhood. Browsers and email clients should ideally have more transparency about the ASNs and service providers who host the websites that people are visiting, so that everyone can develop a mental model of which ones are associated with good things, because right now the only people who are able to have any kind of awareness of this thing are operators who regularly monitor traffic.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    This is completely valid, but if you go hunting for an IP block that has never been used for spam at this point you're going to be looking for a long time. It should not be the #1 consideration when choosing a hosting provider just because someone abused their IP block in the past (possibly before they even owned it). In any case, trying to run mail off a VPS would be stupid and that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying we don't all need to capitulate to paying Amazon or Google to forward our outbound mail, and it would be better if we did not, even considering the struggles attached to bucking the trend.

bryans 5y ago

You have this all backward. > You actually think that the best answer to a network engineering problem is to make legal threats at third party ISPs? It's not a "network engineering problem" if administrators and managers are the ones making the decisions to provide no reasonable recourse for a ban, on top of actively ignoring or denying legitimate requests for removal. If the third party hasn't broken any rules, then the only resort is getting attorneys involved, because there are literally no other options if the provider refuses to act in good faith. > Companies with which you don't have a signed service order contract and/or master services agreement? If you are providing an email service and your customers are not receiving the emails they're expecting, all because you refused to acknowledge a removal request, then it shouldn't matter if you have a relationship with the third party. You've failed your own customers, and for no legitimate, logical or even conceivable reason, other than to assert some personal dominance over another group of engineers that you see as "lesser." None of this is an engineering problem. It's an asshole problem.

walrus01 5y ago
> If you are providing an email service and your customers are not receiving the emails they're expecting, all because you refused to acknowledge a removal request, And on this I concur with you, because if the sender of the email is actually sending spam and has ended up on some smtp-receiving deny lists for well founded reasons, they are indeed failing their customers. Failing them through their own lack of procedure and policy, such as not having a click to remove link in the mail, and not removing addresses/putting addresses into a scrub-before-sending list. If that is the case, they have nobody to blame but themselves for that and should not be sending legal demands to other peoples' ISPs such as at&t or Comcast.
- noduerme 5y ago
  You're assuming facts not in evidence, such as that we don't have policies for unsubscribing, or that we're sending spam in the first place. To be clear, we've never complained to anyone except on behalf of customers who complained to us that they weren't getting our mail.
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

oarsinsync 5y ago

> You actually think that the best answer to a network engineering problem is to make legal threats at third party ISPs? If the remote mailserver is explicitly bouncing your mails, it's not a network engineering problem. If you're able to complete a TCP 3 way handshake, it's not a network engineering problem. If you're being prevented from completing a TCP 3 way handshake because of a filter list on the MX server, it's not a network engineering problem. Admittedly, you can't tell that one without asking a network engineer (on the remote network) to validate that for you, or asking the application owner to advise. Contrary to popular advice (thanks MSFT), you probably shouldn't contact your network administrator. We probably have priv 15, but we dont necessarily have root.

noduerme 5y ago

>> per SMTP destination multiplied by N number of destinations The number of people using anything other than google, apple, microsoft or yahoo for personal email these days is vanishingly small; and of the remainder, almost all of them are on major broadband providers. If you were some local ISP blocking us, that wouldn't be worth the trouble of sending a legal letter. I'd just tell that particular customer to contact you and ask why you weren't delivering our mail. This only leaves other corporations that provide their own mail services to people who work there, and if those people want to get their mail they can call IT.

znpy 5y ago

A decent company and big enough already has at least one lawyer on payroll, so no need to be billed the additional 500$/hour

luser007 5y ago

Tangentially related: Somebody created a github containing domains he thought should be blocked: https://github.com/chadmayfield/my-pihole-blocklists https://github.com/chadmayfield/my-pihole-blocklists A year later I bought a domain that had expired under my country TLD. It turns out that domain for some reason was previously added to that list. Now, as you can see, the man behind that Github repo has decided to archive that repo and therefore make it read only. As you can tell from both pull requests and issues on that repo, people has asked him to remote legitimate domains (e.g. *.urbandictionary.com). But those calls remain unanswered. It is fruitless to contact the author. So this random dude causes real problems for legitimate business and individuals and we should just accept it? Obviously he doesn't act on friendly geek requests. It seems lawyering up would be the only recourse in this situation. I find it analogous to somebody standing on a soap box in a village and announcing: "Don't trust James. Don't trust Mary either. There's problems with Charles" and James, Mary, and Charles have no way of stopping his libel. I don't have the funds for legal action, but it is obviously wrong that he can announce "these domains are bad" and offer no way of fixing mistakes. He should take down the repo, but oh that sweet sweet Github karma probably discourages him from doing so.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> I find it analogous to somebody standing on a soap box in a village and announcing: "Don't trust James. Don't trust Mary either. You're speaking of some random domain-list on github - that isn't even maintained? Taken from someone's private pihole? Anyone using a list of that kind to block is simply incompetent. Even as part of a scoring system, it's pretty silly. Before adding a blocklist, a postmaster needs to familiarize herself with the list's policies. Are list entries aged-out? How quickly? Do they use spamtraps, or user-reports? Or is it just the whim of the list-maintainer? Do they block individual addresses, whole domains, or entire allocations? > So this random dude causes real problems for legitimate business and individuals and we should just accept it? So you're having problems sending mail to a domain where the postmaster cares more about rejecting spam than she does about receiving legitimate email. That's a matter for your recipient to take up with their MSP. And if the recipient wants to receive mail from small-time domains, they need to accept that they're going to receive some spam as well; but maybe they need to switch to an MSP that only rejects on strong evidence. My point is that it's your recipient's choice to use an MSP that blocks using some crazy list they found on github. Some postmasters will block everything from selected countries; at one time I would block everything from Romania, because none of my users had correspondents in Romania, and email from Romania at that time was 100% spam. But I wasn't providing service to the public. I knew all my users. Different MTAs have different users, and different patterns of abusive email. So if you want to use a custom blocklist, make your own, based on your own incoming spam (and then you can honour removal requests yourself). Otherwise use a public blocklist, based on multiple spamtraps in multiple ISPs. So yes, you should just accept it. You don't have a right to have mail delivered by any MSP you send to; they're private organisations or individuals, and they're entitled to determine what their own policies are. In the world of email, nobody is entitled to protection from the foolishness of others.