RBL Adjustment Notice - rfc-ignorant.org removed By Peter M. Abraham May 2004 The fight against spam -- unsolicited email -- is a hard and daily battle where there are times as a hosting provider we often find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. It is our desire to be 100% spam free for our customers, our board of directors, and our employees. Yet in fulfilling that desire we often times find innocent parties caught in the middle gasping for breath; and not knowing where to turn for help.  They are distraught that their email no longer works, and that the Internet is for everyone else but them.  They wonder who really cares about them and their needs. What am I talking about?  Let me try to paint the picture. An ISP or company wanting to set up their mail server has a requirement (it is a rule of conduct on the Internet -- for those interested, established in May 1997) to ensure that all contact information to be valid (and remain valid) when they register the domain name they plan to use to send email. Often times a spam provider (whose sole purpose is sending out spam for as long as possible) will register the domain name they use to send out their spam with falsified information. http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/ is a Web site that keeps track of mail server IP addresses where the domain name contains inaccurate contact information. We have been using rfc-ignorant.org to help reduce the amount of spam our customers receive on the basis that most spam providers do falsify information; and rfc-ignorant.org has been (and continues to be) extremely accurate in identifying who has invalid contact information. Thanks to input from our clients -- Sandy Tapper, Cornelius Koelewijn, Martin van Duijn, Justin Olanin, and others -- we found out that while rfc-ignorant.org was accurate in so far as identifying IP address of mail servers with bad contact information, that (unfortunate as it is and sounds) there are a lot of ISP's and company run (internal) mail servers where the managers either did not have good quality assurance, just didn't know better or forgot to update the contact information if an employee left. The end result was that customers of those ISP's  where paying the price.  Most customers do not have the tools or know-how to check if their email provider is obeying the "valid contact information" rule."  They were innocent victims caught in the cross fire. While we would get involved in conference calls and technical support with our customers to help them work with their ISP to obey the rule, a lot of times the customer or the ISP didn't know what to do. For those of you who detest spam as much as I do, you may say... how hard can it be to have valid contact information (email address and phone number)?  And that they -- the email provider -- should have quality controls. Yet we found such large companies as AT&T, MCI, Chello (overseas) and others didn't pay attention.  While that's sad, it still didn't save our customers and their business contacts from having to pay the price. In ending, we removed rfc-ignorant.org as one of the RBL's (real time black hole lists) that we utilize to fight spam. We are continuing (often daily) to look at ways to reduce spam that impact our customers positively; please do feel free to provide your input, thoughts, and comments. Thank you.