Spews.org out of control

First of all, www.spews.org is a list of areas on the Internet that several system administrators, ISP postmasters, and other service providers have assembled and use to deny email and in some cases, network traffic, from. They basically are attempting to stop email spammers.

This is a case of a good thing gone wrong. A few days ago, my webhost went down because one person was accused of sending spam from an account hosted wtih them. www.spews.org immediately had their IP's blacklisted. They canceled the account of the abuser immediately even though it turns out this person was not sending spam at all. Here's an email I received today regarding the service outage.

Dear Valued Customer,

We thank you for your patronage through this difficult time. We have acquired a new range of IP addresses for the servers that we control. Our old IP addresses were black listed by www.spews.org making them unusable.

Once we get all the IP addresses manually configured and DNS properly set up, propagation will take place. This usually takes 24 – 72 hours. So we are optimistic that we will be back online by Tuesday morning. More than likely it will happen prior to this, but we wanted to be conservative in our estimate. We are working 24 hours a day to get all the IP addresses sorted out and set up.

If you require personalized DNS please send an e-mail to xxx@xxx.com and we will assign you your IP addresses and assist you in setting it up.

Please write your congress and let them know about this terrible incident that has taken place. The organization www.spews.org is the worst case of Internet terrorism that could possibly exist. They are the judge, jury, and executioner with a holier than though attitude. It was found out that the customer who was accused of spamming had not even sent one piece of spam. Instead he was selling broadcast e-mail software. So all this happened because www.spews.org had a problem with that.

To let you know the extent of the damage that this company can do I will relay this short story that happened during this tantrum of Spews.

We have a customer that was backing us up on this matter, so he took it upon himself to try and contact spews.org. He sent them one e-mail expressing his feelings regarding this matter. They black listed his e-mail IP and then blocked out his entire ISP’s range of IP addresses shutting down their entire e-mail server for a solid day costing that company $150,000.

This has to stop please write your congressman regarding this situation.

Thank you for your patronage!

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Really incredible the power that this organization has. Their intention is good -- stopping spam by blacklisting offending IPs. But it seems the power they wield has gone to their head. Sucks for me as I will have to go an entire week without access to my hosting. :\

Spews becomes such a pain in the hosting industry. The idea is good, but half the time it seems like they are doing a lot more harm than any good.

Dude... wtf is with your sig???

How can so many people not remember this story? It seems I have to explain it in every thread I post in...

Anyway, It happened a couple weeks ago when a woman held a gun to her sons head so she wouldn't be taken by the cops.

my websites went down as well, thanks to spewidiots.

I am a sys admin responsible for the e-mail services at our company. If it weren't for the free services of spews, spamhaus.org, osirusoft.com, surfcontrol, etc our mail accounts would be flooded with 99 percent junk mail. In general, these services work great for us. In the rare event that a customer of ours is blocked and we want their mail, it's easy for us to let their mail pass the RBL check. We usually review the spews case and in some cases tell them to change their ISP to a company with better policy enforcement.

Sorry to here that you got in spews. Post your case number so we can see the history. My bet is that you are hosting with a company that has a history of being spammer friendly.

Brasstax said:

I am a sys admin responsible for the e-mail services at our company. If it weren't for the free services of spews, spamhaus.org, osirusoft.com, surfcontrol, etc our mail accounts would be flooded with 99 percent junk mail. In general, these services work great for us. In the rare event that a customer of ours is blocked and we want their mail, it's easy for us to let their mail pass the RBL check. We usually review the spews case and in some cases tell them to change their ISP to a company with better policy enforcement.

Sorry to here that you got in spews. Post your case number so we can see the history. My bet is that you are hosting with a company that has a history of being spammer friendly.

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Here Here ... fucking straight. Here is my mail server config

g_orbs_list name="relays.osirusoft.com" action="deny" stamp="ordb_osirusoft"
g_orbs_list name="relays.ordb.org" action="deny" stamp="ordb_rbl"
g_orbs_list name="dnsbl.njabl.org" action="deny" stamp="ordb_njabl"
g_orbs_list name="bl.spamcop.net" action="deny" stamp="ordb_spamcop"
g_orbs_list name="proxies.blackholes.easynet.nl" action="deny" stamp="ordb_bh_easy"
g_orbs_list name="proxies.relays.monkeys.com" action="deny" stamp="ordb_monkeys"
g_orbs_list name="list.dsbl.org" action="deny" stamp="ordb_list.dsbl"
g_orbs_list name="sbl.spamhaus.org" action="deny" stamp="ordb_spamhaus"
g_orbs_list name="blackholes.easynet.nl" action="deny" stamp="ordb_easynet"

Since implementing those, spam has gone from 50+ per day (per account/customer), down to 2-3 per week. When my customers complain, I tell them to open a hotmail account and those that are blocked can send them there. NOT MY PROBLEM if other ISP's are so gay they wind up in spews. The primary reason an ISP winds up in spews is if the abuse@ account isnt checked within 24 hours. If the admin box is checked, and action is taken, you dont wind up in spews, simple. So if your ISP is in spews, serves them right for being so slow on reading abuse@ email.

hahaha so making publically available a list of ip's that you dont accept mail from is internet terrorism now ?

Sysadmins of the world decide to trust the advice that SPEWS and other RBL's provide, no one is forcing them to use it. The fact that so many do is testamount to how successful RBL's have been.

If you dont like it, there is no point in bitching here, bitching at your congressman, or bitching at any else besides your netblock owner. Because it's their behaviour, or lack thereof, that is the reason for why the ip range has been listed.

The creator of "ORBS" (Open-Relay Blocking System) was some kiwi guy who got the shit sued out of him.
He added New Zealands 2 largest ISP's to the ORBS blacklist once when ORBS was still quite popular because he had a gripe with the ISP's service.
Apparently he got sued & sent to prison, and nobodies heard from him since..
The ISP/Webhost probably supports Open-Relay SMTP so it was added to the list.

Amen telco. It's pretty clear that this place actually is doing more harm than good at this point if left unchecked. Nazis.