Mark Sapiro wrote:
Kenneth Porter wrote:
Note that black lists don't block anything. They just report. It's like a web page that lists some group that the author thinks meets some criteria.
Others can then use the black lists they trust to block unwanted traffic. I hardly consider either action to be unreasonable.
That's what the maintainers of black lists say, but in fact, the popular black lists are almost universally used by people who consider them a response to the spam problem without considering that the critera for being blacklisted and for being removed from blacklists are under control of the operators of the lists who guarantee no due process and are accountable to no one.
Who says that benevolent-dictator blacklists cannot be an effective response to the spam prolem?
And of course it is untrue that these benevolent dictators are accountable to no one. They are accountable to the users of their blacklists. If users learn that a blacklist is becoming too inaccurate, they will stop using it, or they would be shooting themselves in the foot by rejecting mail from innocent sources.