Brilliant Corners

Until I can write some sort of anti-comment spam code for this weblog, I have all submitted comments go into a queue where I can approve them. I even have this right above the submit button:

Until I do a little more work, all comments will be screened; your comment won’t show up right away.

But still, I get comment spam. I don’t get very much, but there are a few folks peddling certain pharmaceutical products that try and sneak some comments in. If they did it only once, and then left me alone after realizing that their comments weren’t making it through, I could understand. But they come back, time and again, and leave the same annoying comments that will never get approved.

This isn’t the worst of it. I also have a comment spammer or two who insists on posting very odd diatribes. No links, no email address, nothing of any particular worth. Just rambles like this:

I've more or less been doing nothing worth mentioning, but eh. My life’s been really bland today…

I've received a few variations of that kind of comment above. So very strange. Surely I'm not the only one getting this kind of odd comment spam, am I?

A few months after Erik started sharing a server at InterLand, I started getting emails bouncing back to me telling me that our server’s IP address had been added to one of the blacklists and that it wouldn’t deliver the message. At first I was confused, and then concerned. Eventually, though, I was pissed off.

The IP address was ours and not shared with any spammers; our mail server had be set up to not allow relaying, so the issue wasn’t there either. I was dumbfounded as to why our server was being singled out. Ahh, but there’s the rub: we weren’t being singled out! The person(s) in charge of the blacklist didn’t add our IP address as an offender, but rather added a whole subnet of IP addresses, not even bothering to check and make sure that they were all bad. I guess their philosophy was “one bad apple spoils the bunch.”

After figuring out what had happened, I started looking everywhere I could to try and figure out what we needed to do to clear our names. It’s not an easy process, and usually it takes getting your ISP involved to contact the list folks themselves. Luckily, while we were trying to find a solution, there must have been someone else within that subnet of addresses that raised a big stink with InterLand, who then went to the blacklist people and got them to remove the subnet from the list. We were in the clear again, which made us very happy. Unfortunately, it left a really bad taste in my mouth as to how the email server blacklists are managed, and the underhanded tactics they take to alleviate spam. Surely there’s a better way, right?

What brought this back to my mind was Paul Graham’s recent essay The Destiny of Blacklists. He’s recounting several similar run-ins with the email server blacklist groups, and he has some harsher words regarding their tactics:

This is, strictly speaking, terrorism: harming innnocent people as a way to pressure some central authority into doing what you want.

Now, I'm not sure I'd call them terrorists, but I can see his point. There needs to be better regulation of the lists, and while I understand they're trying to make the internet a better place by stopping spam, they need to chill with the bad practices.