Have I mentioned that I hate the Internet?
8 o'clock, July 27, 2003
So I thought I had mail.chrononaut.org fairly well locked down, but it appears that the spammers discovered a new trick or two and have been using it as a spam relay for at least the last several weeks. Naturally I don’t discover this until one of the various real-time black hole servers sends me a helpful note yesterday letting me know that I’ve been added to it.
Instead of writing, therefore, I spend all of yesterday evening digging through mail logs (you wouldn’t believe how quickly your mail server’s log grows when someone’s trying to span through it every four seconds) and Postfix configuration files and mailing lists and black-hole sites trying to plug the holes. For the moment, at least, there doesn’t seem to be any water coming through the dike, but naturally it’ll take anywhere from 24 hours to infinity to actually get de-listed from all the black-hole servers — some of which are very aggressive about taking one another’s word that a site should be on the list, but passive to the point of immobility when it comes to taking it off.
Luckily I don’t use chrononaut for much of my personal mail — though it is the address that gets published on this web site, and the one I get cc’d to when someone posts a comment here; mostly I use discontent.com. And I’m embarrassed to say that Brandon seems to have done a better job administering Postfix than I have (even though I’ve been using it for years, he’s been using qmail till quite recently, and he started by copying all my configuration files) so discontent seems to be okay.
But, still, it’s a pain in the ass. And I’m sure in a few months someone will find another hole and it’ll start all over again.
Have I mentioned that I hate the Internet?
Sympathies. As I may've mentioned recently, I used to like the idea of blacklists that forced people to fix problems, but I've recently learned that I really hate the extant implementations, notably the phenomenon you mention whereby it's trivial to get added (rightly or wrongly) to the list, but takes a while for them to get around to removing you. I'd much prefer them to do the opposite: be slow to add and fast to remove. Send out a notification, then another a few days later, then a final notice a few days after that, and after maybe a week of trying to notify the postmaster, then list the site. And delist it automatically if postmaster fills in a form on the site and automatic mailer system determines that the relay's now closed.