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Why Blacklisting Spammers Is A Bad Idea
from the no-recourse dept
Roland Piquepaille writes "For the last two months, an eternity in Internet time, I was unable to reach -- and to contribute to -- Smart Mobs, the collective blogging effort Howard Rheingold's ideas. Why is that? Because an unknown customer of Verio decided it was a spamming site and asked the company to blacklist the site. Verio complied -- probably without even checking it -- and my problems started. It took me dozens of e-mails and phone calls and two visits to the headquarters of my French ISP, Noos, to fix the situation. More about this horror story is available here." It's true. As much as we hate spam, there are more and more stories like this one out there. Over reacting in the opposite direction isn't doing any good.
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Bad counter-example
Verio complied -- probably without even checking the site -- and my problems started.
Let's keep this in perspective... this is a story about Verio's incompetence, not about the efficacy of blacklisting spam sites.
Mike, I think you were too quick to jump onto your blacklisting is bad soapbox here. It's a bit strange, then, that you don't have a negative thing to say about Steve Linford in your profile of the NY Times piece... especially given this quote:
"We don't like to see that we are blacklisted," wrote Lin Chen, an administrator at Chinanet-Shanghai, in an e-mail interview. He called the blocking actions of anti-spam groups "functional and effective." Spamhaus, he wrote, promptly removed the block when the spammers were cut off.
Golly gosh, perhaps targeted, responsible blacklisting is good?
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