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> The thing is, if you own a good IP in a mixed block with some bad ones, that's no reason for you to be blacklisted. It's pure laziness. Yes, in that situatio

> The thing is, if you own a good IP in a mixed block with some bad ones, that's no reason for you to be blacklisted. It's pure laziness. Yes, in that situation it's laziness, but on the part of your ISP. ISPs already spend huge amounts of time and money dealing with spam, hacking attempts, phishing attacks, etc. If your ISP is irresponsible and isn't doing their job keeping those things from leaving their network then your ISP is gong to find their entire IP space blocked and that's 100% reasonable. Why should we ever accept traffic from an ISP that refuses to keep their corner of the network clean when it's just going to cause problems for us and our users? That's the situation for every ISP on the internet. Keep your users in line, keep trash off your network or else no one is going to accept traffic from you. You could call it laziness, but it simply isn't worth it. We'd rather spend our time cleaning up abuse on our own network and working with ISPs who are doing their job than dealing with the problems we get from bad actors. If you own an IP surrounded by a bunch of spammers and it's giving you trouble step 1 should be to contact your ISP and tell them to get their shit in order or you'll take your business to an ISP who does their job. Step two is to switch to a new ISP if they don't. No one has the right to force us to accept traffic from anyone else. It's every ISPs responsibility to make sure the traffic leaving their network isn't more trouble than it's worth. Good ISPs are rewarded because users will give them their business and stay and bad ISPs are punished because users will drop their service when they see they are blocked. The goal isn't to punish the poor sucker who signed on with an irresponsible host, but to cut down on the number of bad ISPs on the internet and the amount of work we have to deal with coming from them.

Silhouette 5y ago
That seems a lot of rationalisation for a situation where a genuine sender on another system sends legitimate mail to a genuine recipient on your system, that mail is not properly delivered, and it's your fault. There is a reason that collective punishment is considered immoral by civilised cultures. It hurts the innocent and often fails to achieve its original goal anyway.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > and it's your fault Or maybe your policy? > There is a reason that collective punishment is considered immoral by civilised cultures Rejecting email submissions isn't punishment, collective or otherwise. It's something you have to do if you run a mailserver. In the same way, I'm not punishing trespassers if I secure my front-door with a deadlock.
  - smaudet 5y ago
    No, but if you secure a cellar with a padlock on hundreds of people, thats called kidnapping and possibly murder.
- autoexec 5y ago
  > That seems a lot of rationalisation for a situation where a genuine sender on another system sends legitimate mail to a genuine recipient on your system, that mail is not properly delivered, and it's your fault. It's how the internet stays functional. If 0.001% of legitimate mail has to go undelivered in order to prevent overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks from an irresponsible network that's an acceptable loss to most people in our civilized culture. Bad actors have been ostracized from communities for as long communities have existed. If you want reliable service, choose a responsible ISP. Blacklists have enabled the internet and email to remain useful for most users most of the time. Without them, email wouldn't be usable. If you have a better solution for spam, the whole world would love to hear it.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    It's how the internet stays functional. [citation needed] If 0.001% of legitimate mail has to go undelivered in order to prevent overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks from an irresponsible network that's an acceptable loss to most people in our civilized culture. 1. It's way more than 0.001%. Like, several orders of magnitude more. 2. What overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks? Those of us using traditional mail systems with traditional spam filtering seem to be doing OK not getting overwhelmed by incoming spam without the kind of "help" you advocate. 3. You don't get to decide what's acceptable to everyone else. Except that apparently you've decided you do, which is why regulation is needed to remove that ability from service providers who can't do their jobs properly and hurt others as a result. If you want reliable service, choose a responsible ISP. This is a poor argument. Any ISP that accepts significant numbers of customers will occasionally have a customer who is either malicious or operating with imperfect security allowing someone else who is malicious to exploit them. The decent ones will identify the problem and block it reasonably quickly, but there is plenty of evidence that they can still be blacklisted and it can still be difficult or impossible to get removed from those blacklists again after the problem is fixed. The kind of policy you advocate punishes small ISPs just for being ISPs. I invite you to apply the same policy fairly and neutrally to larger organisations such as the major mail forwarding services and cloud hosts as well and see how long you survive in this industry. Or maybe the rest of us should apply the same policy to organisations that do what you advocate. If they won't deliver mail reliably, we won't forward any mail to them at all, so their mail service becomes useless. Except of course it's some of the biggest mail services that do this, so just like no-one's going to block incoming mail from AWS or MailChimp, no-one's going to block outgoing mail to Google or Microsoft. If you have a better solution for spam, the whole world would love to hear it. Block actual spam sources and provide a reasonable method for removing blocks that are no longer necessary. Don't carpet bomb whole chunks of the Internet just because there are a few bad actors around. Don't fire and forget. It's really not difficult and plenty of small organisations operate just fine on this basis every day.

Silhouette 5y ago

That seems a lot of rationalisation for a situation where a genuine sender on another system sends legitimate mail to a genuine recipient on your system, that mail is not properly delivered, and it's your fault. There is a reason that collective punishment is considered immoral by civilised cultures. It hurts the innocent and often fails to achieve its original goal anyway.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> and it's your fault Or maybe your policy? > There is a reason that collective punishment is considered immoral by civilised cultures Rejecting email submissions isn't punishment, collective or otherwise. It's something you have to do if you run a mailserver. In the same way, I'm not punishing trespassers if I secure my front-door with a deadlock.
- smaudet 5y ago
  No, but if you secure a cellar with a padlock on hundreds of people, thats called kidnapping and possibly murder.
autoexec 5y ago
> That seems a lot of rationalisation for a situation where a genuine sender on another system sends legitimate mail to a genuine recipient on your system, that mail is not properly delivered, and it's your fault. It's how the internet stays functional. If 0.001% of legitimate mail has to go undelivered in order to prevent overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks from an irresponsible network that's an acceptable loss to most people in our civilized culture. Bad actors have been ostracized from communities for as long communities have existed. If you want reliable service, choose a responsible ISP. Blacklists have enabled the internet and email to remain useful for most users most of the time. Without them, email wouldn't be usable. If you have a better solution for spam, the whole world would love to hear it.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  It's how the internet stays functional. [citation needed] If 0.001% of legitimate mail has to go undelivered in order to prevent overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks from an irresponsible network that's an acceptable loss to most people in our civilized culture. 1. It's way more than 0.001%. Like, several orders of magnitude more. 2. What overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks? Those of us using traditional mail systems with traditional spam filtering seem to be doing OK not getting overwhelmed by incoming spam without the kind of "help" you advocate. 3. You don't get to decide what's acceptable to everyone else. Except that apparently you've decided you do, which is why regulation is needed to remove that ability from service providers who can't do their jobs properly and hurt others as a result. If you want reliable service, choose a responsible ISP. This is a poor argument. Any ISP that accepts significant numbers of customers will occasionally have a customer who is either malicious or operating with imperfect security allowing someone else who is malicious to exploit them. The decent ones will identify the problem and block it reasonably quickly, but there is plenty of evidence that they can still be blacklisted and it can still be difficult or impossible to get removed from those blacklists again after the problem is fixed. The kind of policy you advocate punishes small ISPs just for being ISPs. I invite you to apply the same policy fairly and neutrally to larger organisations such as the major mail forwarding services and cloud hosts as well and see how long you survive in this industry. Or maybe the rest of us should apply the same policy to organisations that do what you advocate. If they won't deliver mail reliably, we won't forward any mail to them at all, so their mail service becomes useless. Except of course it's some of the biggest mail services that do this, so just like no-one's going to block incoming mail from AWS or MailChimp, no-one's going to block outgoing mail to Google or Microsoft. If you have a better solution for spam, the whole world would love to hear it. Block actual spam sources and provide a reasonable method for removing blocks that are no longer necessary. Don't carpet bomb whole chunks of the Internet just because there are a few bad actors around. Don't fire and forget. It's really not difficult and plenty of small organisations operate just fine on this basis every day.