‘Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.’ — H.L. Mencken
For me that time was today. I’ve been using SpamAssassin ever since it came out and usually it keeps my inboxes fairly clean. Of course: Over the years I made many custom modifications, added blacklists, threw in greylisting. Even wrote my own Sendmail Milter to deal with email traffic accounting and to implement GeoIP blocks.
However: Just recently I started getting a metric fuckton of SPAM yet again, which ‘cleverly’ (not so much) avoided tagging. Another custom rule, here we come!
But wait: There is more!
A lot of the SPAM came from the same networks. Sure, they recycle IPs, switch IPs within SPAM runs and therelike. We’ve seen it all. No surprises. But as I’m a little tired of applying custom rules on all my mailservers every now and then, I decided to say “Fuck it!” and decided to run my own RBL.
We already run a network of master/slave PowerDNS servers with MySQL backend and automatic replication, so why not? I set a domain (solarspeed.info) aside for it and threw in a custom PHP page that allows me to feed the MySQL backend of this DNS zone via a form and URL parameters. Easy peasy, 30 minutes of work of setting it up and testing it.
Here we are now.
If you are reading this, then maybe you wonder why your email was being rejected by either the SOLARSPEED.NET, SMD.NET or BLUEONYX.IT domains (or others which use this RBL).
Why? Because: YOU MADE ME ANGRY!!
The easy way to end up on this blacklist is to send me an unsolicited email. If that happens once, you’re on. And afterwards all our mailservers will reject your emails at the MTA level. Indefinitely. If I’ve got an especially bad day, I will also indiscriminately block your entire network address range with a DNS wildcard.
How to get off the blacklist?
For those who falsified God’s words. Fall to your knees. So beg. Pray for mercy. In the eve of the hour all will beg. And pray for mercy.