Hi,

I know that in Spam Database Lookup you add a ***APEWS [should not be used]**** warning. but I wonders what can cause you to stop monitoring it at all on the Spam Database Lookup. I suggest you will make a survey here on your forum (hoping you will find out that most of this tool users, would like to see you kik APEWS out of your tool.
They should be totaly ignord just like they are acting.

Regards.

The reason for showing them is because their list does exist. The "Should not be used" is the most clear information that they are not a respected list.

I think listing them as "Should not be used" has more effect (if any) then not listing them at all! Besides, some people do want to know if they are listed by ASPEWS for various reasons.

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URL: http://www.apews.org/?page=check
Paragraph 3 of the text reads:Now, that's just obnoxious of them.

DNSstuff is absolutely terrific, but I cannot understand why you would give any credibility to APEWS by listing them at all. At minimum, they should be placed at the bottom of the page, with an explanation of their tactics. I just learned about this "organization" recently, since being listed.

I rent servers from a good sized service provider, but recently I found my IP addresses showing on APEWS. This is not because of any issue from my servers, but another client of the hosting service. I contacted my hosting service, and they already knew of the issue, and told me that the offending client was terminated one day after they signed up with the services, for violating their own Acceptable Use Policy.

However, due to a reported instance from this one client, APEWS lists over 2000 IP addresses for my service provider, which involved numerous servers and countless innocent and honest domains (including the 20 domains I manage). Even though the issue was spotted and fixed immediately, APEWS does not ask for, nor accept any corrective action. They just keep building their listing, without any concern for damage they cause to innocent business owners.

This is why I am disappointed to see them on your listing (all my IPs glowing in red under APEWS), and there is no way to correct it, except to spend more money and time to find another host. But why should I move, and waste my money? The abuse is by APEWS.

Please boot APEWS, or at least clearly separate their listing from others, to another section of the page, instead of at the top of the list, and clearly label it as a useless and invalid listing.

Thank you.


P.S. Initially, I read the "should not be used" as a message to visitors looking up my domains, and telling them not to use my services since listed on APEWS. Hopefully others would read it correctly at first look, but the damage is already done.

Booting APEWS is not the idea. The idea of the tool is to list all public available blacklists, including malicious ones. Perhaps making the notes "Should not be used" more clear like "This blacklist should not be used". I find APEWS should not be removed! It is usefull to know for some people if they are listed bij them. Then they can take action when email is bounced for being on APEWS (like contacting the target domain and explaining the APEWS problem). If it were to be blocked using APEWS and APEWS is not on the list of public blacklists, then DNS-stuff is providing incomplete information. We would not want that right?

By the way:
The damage is done by APEWS, not by DNSstuff, DNSstuff is only providing you with information.

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I'm a little confused, too, because the results for one of our servers under APEWS was 127.0.0.2 which would indicate a "hit" on that list. However, when I went to APEWS and manually submitted the IP, it said the IP was not listed.

Which begs the question, why was my server's APEWS listing red?

I believe that there was a "glitch" a day or two ago, when a mirror site stopped serving up APEWS, and for a while DNSstuff was (allegedly) reporting every host as being in APEWS.

Whereas "normally" they only report about one third of the internet LOL

Contrary to some posters here, I do approve of listing the disreputable as well as the reputable block lists. In the unlikely event of any domain admin actually using APEWS to block email, it would help to have somewhere which (a) confirms that this list is the problem (b) tells me and him why him using this list is a bad idea.

Otherwise, I would have to start searching elsewhere for lists which are not in this list of lists ...

In addition to the words "should not be used", can we add "malicious blacklist"? I think that there needs to be something stronger.

I will ask the support group to give serious consideration to your suggestion. I agree that the wording should be a bit stronger.

-David

I'm pretty much in complete agreement, but I kind of have to keep personal preference out of it. The reasoning behind having APEWS there and not giving it any 'special treatment' is to keep the tool complete and informative.

Someone, somewhere, is using APEWS as part of a spam filtering system and if they are denying mails because of it, DNSstuff really needs to be there to allow their 'rejection victims' to find out where the problem lies. This is especially true of spam filter weighting systems, where there are multiple blacklists in use, and there is no easy way to find out the root of the problem unless you do a complete RBL check.

FYI though, we are currently brainstorming a method to allow DNSstuff users to 'rate' blacklists based on personal opinion, and possibly color-coding or marking those that have high ratings and low ratings. This way we hope people can see what the consensus on a blacklist is among DNSstuff users. It's one of those 'in the future' things, but we are aware that the current system is high-maintenance and outdated.

Kevin
DNSstuff Support