If there's one thing worse than spam...

... it's the self-appointed NetCops who interfere with legitimate mail from organizations to their members in the name of stopping spam. MAPS, ORBS, and now DSBL all work by similar methods:

• Somebody finds that a site isn't behaving exactly the way it should with respect to its mail servers. A common sin is having a mail server that accepts unauthenticated mail from third parties and sends it out toward the Internet.


• The NetCops accept the evidence of this misbehavior and put out a DNS zone which lists the IP addresses in question.


• Other ISP's subscribe to this zone and use the contents to block mail from one place to another.

This is all well and good, except when it prevents legitimate users from getting mail out to their friends because their ISP has run afoul of one of these sites, which sets itself up as judge, jury, and executioner.

Bastards.