I really hope this latest internet vigilante project from Paul falls flat on its face. To say that his RBL project failed to stop spam is a candidate for 'understatement of the decade'; it not only completely, unutterably, miserably, and totally failed to even slow down spam in any measurable way, but it created an unending series of headaches for system administrators and customers caught in the middle of warring ISPs.

Coincidentally, just a few minutes ago -- just before loading up HN for the first time in a while -- I received an email from one of my clients asking me for advice. Their domain provider has been listed by SORBS, the domain provider is arguing that the listing was unwarranted and is refusing to pay any of the $50 "fine" that SORBS may request, if they request it. I have had to handle situations like this at least several times a year, and I'm not even an ISP. Another of my clients, a while back, briefly had their DSL IP listed in an RBL. They don't run a mail server from that IP, I vigilantly monitor their network for any signs of abuse so I'm fairly confident that there are no zombies on the network, and everyone's workstation is configured to send mail to an outbound mail server. Despite all this, the temporary listing in the RBL caused intermittent email disruption with misconfigured recipient servers that were incorrectly checking email headers for intermediate IPs listed in the RBL (mostly, ISPs using Barracuda Networks' latest bits of vomit). I contacted the RBL through the appropriate channels, and a few days later the block was removed without any other response or explanation from them.

This is absurdity. This is not how a healthy "internet" can work. This juvenile "my network, my rules" approach is no different from opposition to net neutrality. This isn't a small network of universities and hobbyists anymore; this is a global network of businesses that, for better or worse, rely on this system to handle important and time-sensitive information.

I would argue that, if you're an internet service provider or are otherwise accepting payment from customers for the purposes of handling some aspect of their electronic communications, then you are duty-bound to take every reasonable effort to ensure that all communications destined for them are able to reach them, and all of their communications are able to reach their destination. That means, for example, not subscribing to RBLs for the sake of lightening the load on your mail server and silently dropping email without notification to your customer.

There are better ways to handle spam now -- greylisting, user-configurable controls, etc. -- and issues in DNS are already being worked on by groups providing services to end users. I would really prefer not to see the adoption of another RBL-like system, since the first one managed to fail so spectacularly at all of its goals.