In my ongoing tweaks of mail systems at work, I reenabled the SORBS spam blacklist for a day.

Whoops!

Apparently, their quixotic crusade to blacklist every IP address from which they’ve ever received spam and demand a $50 ransom to be delisted continues. As you might imagine, given the number of users on their systems, providers like GMail, Ameritech, and Yahoo! have spam come through their mail servers from time to time, which lands them on the blacklist. As you also might imagine, these providers apparently have little interest in paying a fine to get delisted, presumably because you’d have to be a little daft to use a blacklist that blocks mail from them.

We’ll see if SORBS ever figures this one out or if their spam list is doomed to irrelevance.