Wired is the latest source to carry coverage of the legal action instigated by Yesmail against MAPS due to MAPS threatening Yesmail’s inclusion in the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL). Essentially, MAPS claims the Yesmail is a spammer that has continued to send spam despite repeated attempts by MAPS to help Yesmail correct the problem. Last week, Yesmail won a temporary restraining order prohibiting their inclusion in the RBL.
Despite Yesmail’s protestations of wide-eyed innocence, I can speak from personal experience that the reality is quite different. Yesmail and it’s affiliate are spammers. I’ve received unsolicited e-mail from them repeatedly, as have an number of my sysadmin friends. Further, since MAPS is a purely voluntary service, I can’t see that Yesmail has a leg to stand on.
So, since MAPS can’t legally block Yesmail for the time being, I’ve taken the action of blocking all of Yesmail’s netblocks at my server. A few conversations with friends of mine and a quick scan of postings on news.admin.net-abuse.email indicates that this is in fact a wide-spread action by sysadmins all over. Frankly, Yesmail fucked up - it’ll be far more difficult to clear all those blocked servers than it ever would have been to institute a genuinely effective opt-in system at Yesmail.
Nonetheless, I’m glad to see the case go forward. I’d love to see MAPS win and be legally validated. Any other outcome would certainly be a victory for spammers everywhere, so I urge anyone who has control of a mail server to weigh-in on the side of the white hats here in any way you can.
