Skye's Blog of Doom

I've wasted so much time dealing with ISPs that use the SPEWS blacklist to filter out spam - my upstream colo is accused of not kicking off a customer that sent spam at some point, so they block thousands of IPs apparently with the intent of causing enough "collateral damage" to innocent customers that they will put pressure on the upstream provider to enforce their AUP. What a load of bull. This article called Why I Won't Use SPEWS expresses the myriad problems with this approach better than I can. It's pure laziness for sysadmins to be using this heavy-handed method rather than more complex spam identification methods, and in my opinion totally unacceptable to be inconveniencing your own customers in order to make a political point. If you care that much, lobby the government to pass stronger anti-UBE legislation.