MAPS sucks...
sucks
and why I do not recommend using their service.
The short story:
MAPS reports block of address as being spam originating one while only a few IPs in the block are at fault. The other one are just being censored and blocked because their neighbors misbehave. Spam deserves to be fought seriously, yet it does not mean that innocent people have to be considered as culprit as a side effect of this fight.
MAPS refuses to remove individual IP from the banned address block (even if they know that this particular IP is not producing SPAM), arguing that only the ISP can make such request.
MAPS is denying me my right to lawfully use the internet (in this case running an SMTP server) from my own IP, and ends up censoring me as a side effect of their fight against SPAM.
MAPS is de facto asking me to put pressure on my ISP to abide by their rules. I am not commenting on the rules which are probably wise, I am arguing on the fact that I do not see why they do not "resolve" this issue together, without taking me as an hostage of their policy.
The long story:
I have an ADSL connection with Free (Proxad) in France. I have a fixed IP: 82.66.79.61 with proper reverse DNS. (on moujik.net). I run a number of web sites (with apache) and my personal mail / smtp servers (pop/imap/smtp/postfix). In other words, I receive messages directly, and I send messages directly without using Free (Proxad) smtp server (mostly because those servers can be painlessly slow, they sometimes get black listed and I like to control my internet setting as much as I can).
In march 2006, I started to have bouncing message coming back to me with the following errors:
<XXXX.YYYYY@banque-courtois.fr>: host mailhost.cdn.fr[194.2.239.196]
said: 550 5.7.1 This system is configured to reject mail from 82.66.79.61. (in
reply to MAIL FROM command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; ingrand.net
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: E8714187648
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; felix@laas.fr
Arrival-Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:37:25 +0200 (CEST)
or
<foo.bar@imag.fr>: host imag.imag.fr[129.88.30.1] said: 553 5.3.0 <foo.bar@imag.fr>...
Rejected - see http://www.mail-abuse.com/enduserinfo.html (in reply to RCPT
TO command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; ingrand.net
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 8EBF7187099
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; felix@ingrand.net
Arrival-Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 15:23:11 +0200 (CEST)
Some systems (such as cdn.fr) would not even tell you why you are banned (very smart indeed) other will tell you which filtering service they use. I this case, MAPS.
Maps (or www.mail-abuse.com, now a subsidiary of Trends Micro) is a company fighting spam... and providing a service of telling you who are the good guys... and who are the bad guys (spammers, etc). I can only applaud such dedication to fighting spam. I am the co-author of one of the earliest anti-spam tool (back in the previous century) and even if nowadays grey listing is really making my life easier, spam is not welcome in my mail box... So I went to the web page and looked up my IP...
Ha Ha... now we are getting somewhere... my IP is blocked in a block of 2**11 (2048) IP addresses in the 82.66.72.0 network. So there must be 2047 bad guys (because as far as I am concern, my IP is clean as a nickel and was never the source of any spam).
Wait wait... that's not that simple. You see, those people at MAPS are smarter than you and me... if they get reports from a number of IPs in the same "address blocks", they block the whole block... got it? They may have tens, or even a hundred bad guys, they block 2048 guys (you are never too careful). Block them all, god will recognize his own... is MAPS motto... What kind of discernment is that? Cannot they be a little bit smarter, or wiser?
So basically, I am being blocked because my "network" neighbor is a bad guy... In fact the whole neighborhood is blocked, because there are bad guys in the neighborhood... Now the funny thing is that they do not claim I am a bad guy (I challenged them to produce a spam coming from my IP... without success), yet believe it or not, they do not want to remove my IP from this block.
Why is it so? ... my ISP has to get in touch with them (or so they say in the mails I exchanged with them)... That sounds to me as taking the final customer as hostage to put pressure on the ISP.
> Why do not you get in touch writh Proxad yourself? why should *I* have
to to do it for you?...
We are in contact with Proxad. If you want address space which you say is allocated
to you to be handled in a more expediant fashion with proxad, then you should
contact them. You pay them; we do not. As a customer, you have a greater potential
to get them to deal with your issue.
Considering the kind of support one gets from Free/Proxad, it will snow in hell before Free gets in touch with them to solve "my" problem. After all, Free may be providing a poor customer service, I do not have (currently) any problen whith them (they are not the one blocking my IP)... and when I do, I solve them with them directly. Moreover, MAPS claims in one of the mail that they are already in touch with Free, yet I should be the one which get them to talk to each other (there is a contradiction here).
I would like the reader to step back and consider again a couple of things:
- I am not guilty of anything, I am lawfully using my fixed IP with proper reverse DNS. Yet, just because some people are badly behaving in my IP neighborhood, the people at MAPS decided that I must be a bad guy too and report me (as well as 2**11 others) as a spam originating address.
- Even if they cannot produce any spam from my IP and despite my request to be removed from their bad guys database, they refuse to do it.
Very nice indeed, let's just imagine the same kind of behavior in other contexts:
- Phone companies could block calls originating from people whose number start with (408) 453-6XXX, just because some people in this range are making prank calls (or to be more accurate, are being reported by a third party as making prank calls)...
- Power companies could cut a whole neighborhood just because a few people are playing with the power-meter...
- US Mail could decide not pick up mail from a particular neighborhood because some people there are sending junk mail.
- What about crime fighting... there are a few criminals/terrorists in this place, lets wipe out the whole place... (this sounds like a Bushism, does not it?)
- etc
So what do we do know? I told them that I was unhappy (pissed is probably more appropriate) and that I will put this story on the web. I will also advertise this page as much as I can and I encourage others to do the same. Again, I am not against MAPS and their policy regarding SPAM, I just think that their policy could be used with more discernment and wisdom, and that there are negative side effects due to their bully way of reporting SPAM originating IPs.
Thus I strongly encourage any mail administrator to not use MAPS until they fix their system and learn to fight spam with more discernment and without causing collateral damage.
Of course, officials from MAPS may react and I will put links and replies here.
Mails
Just to show that I am not making any of this up, I included the emails I exchanged with MAPS ... enjoy!