Actual Complaining: Nixspam
John accused me of complaining about systemd… this here’s *real*
complaining.
Several times every month, my email starts getting bounced by freakin’
nixspam, because my giant hosting provider, that hosts millions of domains. Akemi has argued that nixspam works just fine (if so, then why did we get that spam a few weeks ago?).
I’ve politely requested being put on a whitelist, and been politely ignored. I’d also be very surprised if that was not configurable.
I’ve also argued that nixspam’s idea of how to block spam is 15 years out of date. More than a dozen years ago, Cogeco was using them, and I was unable to email a close friend in Canada, because of that, and there was no way to get me off the list. And… at the time, my provider was roadrunner, a division of the multinational Time-Warner, and in my area of Chicago, like many areas of Chicago at the time, they were THE ONLY ISP, having bought up or driven out of business all others. This meant that not just me, but tens of thousands of others in Chicago couldn’t get through to anyone whose provider chose to use nixspam.
Now, almost all small ISPs are long gone, at least in the US, having been eaten or driven under by huge corporations. It is a common thing for ISPs and hosting providers to use a *single* domain for a mailhost, at least for some large subset of their domains. I have zero information, or confidence, that nixspam would not block Verizon, the giant telecom that provides my network access at home, for the same reason.
For those reasons, I am once again urging the list owner to *change* spam blocking, and stop using nixspam. At the very least, I request that you
*please* put me on a whitelist.
Yes, I argue… but so do most of us, and I think that I’ve helped a number of folks with solutions to problems over the years, if I need to justify my presence on this list.
mark
15 thoughts on - Actual Complaining: Nixspam
I have seen you post this complaint here several times before.
It would probably be easier on your blood pressure to simply post to this mailing list using a different email provider. I note that your whois record for 5-cent.us shows that you have at least one other active email address (or it should be active), and I see many people posting to this list from free webmail providers like gmail as well.
Since complaining about this issue has obviously not solved your problem, perhaps a different, and proactive approach on your part will. Posting from a different email address may be the best solution.
Frank Cox wrote:
Yup.
a) I will not use gmail. End of that suggestion. b) What assurance do I have that whoever I chose won’t wind up with the same problem, given that, as I mentioned, a dozen years ago, they were blocking a good part of the city of Chicago?
mark
Ok. There are numerous other providers available. I’m sure you can find them as easily as I can. You also have the rcn.com email address in your whois record.
What assurance do you have that your house won’t burn down tonight? This is basic problem solving. You have an issue, you do your best to solve the problem,. If the fix you tried doesn’t work you move on to try something else.
You have posted complaints without solving the problem. Now try a using a different email account. If that doesn’t solve the problem,, try another one. If you don’t want to use a different email account, you can consider moving your 5-cent.us domain to a different host provider. You may want to set up a web/mailserver and start hosting your own domain. There is no shortage of options available here if your objective is to actually solve the problem and not just to continue to post complaints.
There are many things that you can do to deal with this situation that will get you a lot further ahead than simply complaining over and over again. That solution is not working now, based on your experience so far it probably won’t work in the future either.. Now it’s time to try a different solution.
I’m sorry if this sounds harsh — it’s not intended to be, really. I get the impression that your enmity (or whatever the proper term is) against this nixspam outfit has blinded you to the fact that there are real solutions to be had. This outfit is causing you a problem? Ok. Understood. Now take steps to route around it, suggestions are posted above, and the problem will go away.
Frank Cox wrote:
Wait, I have *what*? How did you find that? I mean, the last time I was on rcn was, I think, ’09, if not ’03.
I agree. Note that I also cc’d CentOS-owner on the original post. The problem is that nixspam’s idea of how to block spam, as I argued, is 15
years out of date.
By the way, IX, the German magazine that runs nixspam, doesn’t respond to emails, either. *THEY* are the problem, not my hosting provider (which, their support tells me, does work with nixspam, and pays a nice chunk of change every time they’re blocked.
mark
Umm, that’s actually hardly true considering the number of providers in Chicago.
Listen… I get it… you’re frustrated. But the fact of the matter is that you’re the only one getting nailed by this that is complaining about it and it’s quite trivial to work around this on your end. Get a
$5 USD a month vps, toss up postfix, lock it down so only you can relay through it, point your outbound mail routing through it, profit. This should take you no more than an hour to set up.
Hell Mark… _I_ will be happy to relay outbound for you, no charge, for as long as you want it.
Should things be the way they are? No, probably not. Should you be ignored by TPTB with regards to this? No, probably not. Is anything likely to change? No, likely not. It is what it is, for better or worse.
The offer is legit. If you want to take me up on it and we can get this fixed for you, awesome. If not, I urge you to take matters into your own hands and implement a solution to address this recurring problem.
John
Then they’re doing it wrong as paying to be delisted is not quite above board.
John
you should update your domain registration, then…
$ whois 5-cent.us
[Querying whois.nic.us]
[whois.nic.us]
Domain Name: 5-CENT.US
Domain ID: D17856795-US
Sponsoring Registrar: eNom, Inc.
… Registrant Name: Mark Roth
… Registrant Email: m.roth2006@rcn.com
… Administrative Contact Name: Mark Roth
… Administrative Contact Email: m.roth2006@rcn.com
… Billing Contact Name: Mark Roth
… Billing Contact Email: m.roth2006@rcn.com
… Technical Contact Name: Mark Roth
… Technical Contact Email: m.roth2006@rcn.com
…
Type “whois 5-cent.us” into your terminal and see what you get.
If that email address is indeed out of date, then I think you’re in violation of icann policy.
See this for further information: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/wdrp-2012-02-25-en
You should probably fix this asap.
That being the case, perhaps you should be talking to your hosting provider. They may not be getting what they’re paying for. Or you may be using the wrong hosting provider; I’m not in a position to judge that.
You still have all of the other options as detailed in my previous message if talking to your hosting provider doesn’t solve the problem.
John R. Dennison wrote:
Around the turn of the decade, there were *NOT*. For example, my nice ISP
got eaten by 21st Century, which got eaten by rcn, which I think was either a branch, or became part of Time-Warner, and that’s just my experience. And for other than dial-up, there WERE NO OTHER cable/Internet providers in large swaths of the city.
That was unexpected, and thank you. I may take you up on that.
At least this time, I could remove myself, as opposed to the times when they complain that “too many spams”, and I have to wait for hostmonster to get them off their case.
As I said, ideal case is for IX to actually respond, and change their methods; second best would be for the listowner to choose some other method of blocking spam – I dunno, a captcha when signing up for the list?
Again, thank you. You’re a scholar…
mark, not a gentleman, neither by breeding, nor Act of Congress
John R. Dennison wrote:
Well, no: they tell me that they are *billed* for each major incident.
mark
John R Pierce wrote:
Crap. I thought I did that a couple of years ago. I’ll try again, and thanks for letting me know.
mark
There is a legal term that applies to this use case: “extortion”
John
The VPS suggestion would be ideal.
Get Exim instead running on CentOS 6 and I’ll share my Exim configuration – its excellent for rejecting spam.
Put a ‘server’ on your home machine and the VPS can forward mail directly to your hard disk (using Exim) ready to be ready by Evolution.
Regards,
Paul. England, EU.
Am 08.10.14 um 23:07 schrieb John R. Dennison:
AFAIK IX is not billing …. They do a great job for couple of years.
The problem might be m.roths provider, if they have a zombi spam system somewhere and dynamic IPs e.g. they can be put on the list.
http://www.heise.de/ix/NiX-Spam-DNSBL-and-blacklist-for-download-499637.html
If your mail server is affected by our blacklist please ask your internet service provider or your network administrator to shut down the spam source in your network because this is the blacklisting reason. Follow the removal instructions on http://www.dnsbl.manitu.net if you need to speed up the delisting process.
my2cents /G
Am 19.11.14 um 15:31 schrieb m.roth@5-cent.us:
So some tech support tells you something, and you believe him for 100%?
Go and get some real prove.
If it is such and idiot’s idea, why are they still so famous and widely used?
Uh. your rudeness gives an deep insight of your state of mind and your POV. masterstroke to be taken seriously!
I know that and a lot of them (still) suck. We hat all over Germany problems couple of years ago with phone companies like eplus and cable tv providers as ISPs getting an RBLs etc. Still web.de, 1&1 and gmx with
++45 millions of mail accounts suck in some ways (currently we are investigating such an issue.)
//very confused head-shaking//
Read all information provided, than start shouting … if you where interested in a objective discussion and problem solving you would have opened the link and read the text and would have seen that this is a quote. sorry that I forgot to mark and underline and point this out that a …. like you can see this.
Over and out. my last2cents on this.
/Götz