SPEWS.ORG - What a joke

So I bought this domain a few weeks ago, and I bought hosting, and guess what? I’m a horrible evil spammer! Yes, anyone who visits my WhoIs info will find I’m blacklisted by a company called SPEWS.

I’m not a spammer.

See, SPEWS, following the fine modern trend of “punish the whole class for what one kid did” that’s so prevalent in today’s law and procedures, bans whole IP ranges for the actions of one spammer. Their reasoning, seen here is that these IP blocks are being rented by hosts who haven’t stopped the spammers. Therefore, every client of the host deserves to be punished.

Uh, yeah. But my IP isn’t listed with Spamcop.net - a known spam prevention site. How did SPEWS get onto WhoIs, when they obviously aren’t any kind of authority?

How effective is that? You go to WhoIs to find out items of genuine concern, things you really maybe should worry about. Now, when I see that a site is SPEWS blacklisted, that won’t mean a bloody thing to me, because I know SPEWS operates like a surgeon trying to stitch with a baseball bat. But not everyone looking up your WhoIs will realize the blacklist doesn’t mean anything.

And it gets worse. Sometimes one C-class of IP’s can be on two different hosts. With all the reselling and shortage of IP addresses, I’ve known people who bought hosting from two separate companies only to find their IP’s in the same C-class. So SPEWS isn’t just punishing the SPAM-friendly host - they may be punishing other hosts as well. And even if I believed my host was spam-friendly - which I do not, based on the lack of corroboration from SpamCop.net and others - how do I know my next IP won’t get blacklisted, too? With these methods, it’s only a matter of time before SPEWS blacklists half the internet. And won’t that be informative!

I’ve written to WhoIs and suggested take these guys off their listing. Anything that open to complete inaccuracy is not worthy of inclusion on an otherwise decent service. I’ll let you know what happens.