Posted: 12th Aug, 2003 By: MarkJ
The increasingly notorious distributed server boycott list (dsbl.org) has, once again, blacklisted the e-mail services of a UK ISP, this time it's
Freeserve's turn in the hot seat:
Mail delivery failure notifications are pointing users towards DSBL.org - the distributed server boycott list - which maintains a list of servers which are "dangerously misconfigured" in such a way as to lend themselves to spammers through the abuse of open relays.
Such a blacklisting effectively means servers at the UK's most popular ISP have been identified as a source of spam, though Freeserve denies its servers permit open relay and rejects the suggestion that it is responsible for spam.
In an email, DSBL.org told Sommerville: "The servers that are [blacklisted] are Freeserve's mail servers. A security issue allowing spammers to abuse any of Freeserve's customers' machines could have resulted in their outgoing mail servers being listed in the DSBL list."The
Silicon item reports that
Freeserve has denied any fault with their service, although will investigate further. BT was, until today, the last service to be hit by a DSBL blacklist.