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At 6/30/2003 02:25 PM, Alex Matulich wrote:
If you have a dial-up connection, hang up the phone, and redail. You'll
probably obtain a different IP address, which isn't blocked.
Alex -
I had the same thing happen to me when we were emailing last week. I did
exactly what you say above and redailed, and the second try sending to you
seemed to go through (and I never mentioned to you I had the problem with
the first try). So, it seems you are exactly correct that at some point
someone else on my ISP must have hit a spam filter and then I randomly got
the same IP address on a dial up line.
When this happened I looked at the www.dnsbl.sorbs.net site. It says if you
get on their blacklist you have to pay them to get off. It seems (from a
very quick read) they give the spam filter software away for free, then if
their spam software catches you in their net, you (or your ISP as the case
may be) have to bribe them to get off the blacklist. Otherwise, anytime you
send email to anyone that is using their free spam filter software (or the
recipients ISP is using the spam filter software as the case may be) you
will be blocked.
I thought this could be an interesting new concept in computer viruses.
Rather than just mess up your computer, virus authors can mess up your
computer then offer to restore your files for a bribe. But it might be a
problem that this would be illegal and it would be hard to set up a payment
system without giving away your identity. However, it seems this spam
filter software got around that problem by doing it in a way that is not
illegal.
The site also said something about Americans should stop whining about
First Amendment rights :-). Here, these are the exact words from the site:
<<<<
Note: Americans, the First Amendment does not apply outside of the USA, nor
should you cry for its direction....
>>>>
(The site seems to be in Australia... no offense to list members in Australia)
It did say that the money they make is going to a legal defense fund to
help stop spamming. Even so, there has to be a better approach to stop
spamming than this blackmail approach :-).
Seriously, now ISPs have to take complaints from their users that they are
randomly getting bad IP addresses on dial up lines, then the ISP needs to
determine which IP addresses are bad and bribe the spam filter software
vendor. All because one of their customers sent an email with a word in the
title that this spam filter doesn't like.
Bob Bolotin
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