No, not that Big Brother… I had never heard of Shilpa Shetty before and I hope never to hear about her again..

Early in the New Year I noticed that my postings were not appearing on OpenOffice.org mailing lists, and people were complaining I wasn’t answering their emails. A little digging around revealed that the mailservers at Collabnet (who provide OpenOffice.org’s infrastructure) were rejecting all my emails:

server refused to talk to me: 554 cylon2.sjc.collab.net

After doing some digging around, it turned out that Collabnet apparently use one of the notorious blacklisting services in an attempt to reduce spam. I have a number of email addresses, and the spam I get from the openoffice.org one is much more than all the others combined. So whatever spam filtering Collabnet use, it doesn’t work (first complaint). What is worse, over a week later, they still haven’t worked out how to get me on their whitelist (second complaint).

So what have I got against blacklisting services? Well, I tried to find who had blacklisted my mail and why. Some services act responsibly – e.g. Spamhaus provide a mechanism where you can get mistakes corrected quickly. However, most of them just will not listen – they are judge, jury, and executioner with no right of appeal. What makes it worse is that the more addresses they have on their blacklists, the greater their appeal to dumb users: we have more IP addresses on our list than any other service (therefore we must be better). Wrong.

So, OpenOffice.org colleagues, if you haven’t heard from me recently, it’s because I’ve been put into solitary confinement by folks who have signed up to a blacklisting service (stupid decision), and don’t know how to configure it (really stupid).

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 8:01 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.