Old blacklists don't always go gently into that good night

Last week a posting was made to the URIBL forum alerting email admins that his long defunct blacklist would change behavior on October 16. I've copied the post below, because I find it both interesting (yes, this is the kind of thing I find interesting) and something that anyone sending mail needs to be aware of.

Hi everyone - just throwing out a heads up to the people on uribl.

I ran a dnsbl, vox.schpider.com many many years ago. I stopped the dnsbl
back in June of 2006, and shut down the server it was running on. Since
that time, all queries to vox.schpider.com have timed out. I made an
attempt to bring the domain name back up in 2008, only to find that people
are still trying to query the domain name.

And by query I mean, there are dozens of completely irresponsible mail
administrators who's email systems are configured to pound the hell out of
my dnsbl hundreds of times per second, non stop, 24/7. A few days ago, I
started to bring the server back online just to find that this is *still*
happening. It's been three solid years - why do people have servers
configured to still try querying my dnsbl? Hasn't anyone looked at their
log files to see that vox.schpider.com has timed out - for years?!

Anyway, because of people's complete apathy toward making their mail
servers responsive and being responsible administrators in general, I
would like people to stop using my dnsbl. Because of that, I see no other
option than to start returning positives for *any* query issued to
vox.schpider.com, beginning 10/16/2009. If you happen to be trying to use
a dead DNSBL, please update your mail server configuration.

If you're not an email administrator and the above doesn't make sense, this person is basically saying "I wanted to re-use this old domain that I used to use for a blacklist, but too many people are still hitting it thinking that it is still valid, and all that traffic is a problem (not to mention expensive), so my only choice is to now make it return a fail message when someone hits it."

Why do you care? Because if you have anyone on your list whose mail server is using blacklist definitions that are checking that website, they'll get a positive returned. This means the mail server will likely reject the message, and it will look like the sending mail server is blacklisted, when, in fact, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD is listed because this guy is simply trying to get people to stop hitting his domain.

The original posting has generated a lot of response from the ESP community as well as from others running blacklists (or are just interested in this kind of thing). The comments run pretty even between two camps. One side is saying "Here here! People need to update their definitions, and if they don't this is an appropriate wake up call." The other side feels that the act is too severe and has suggested some other options (such as looking up the contacts associated with the domains hitting him).

I have to agree with the first camp. Sure, contacting them is a nice step (and he has seemed receptive to that) but if they're not regularly updating definitions, chances are they may not be checking their published technical contact address regularly either.

So, come October 16, if you see some addresses in your mailings bouncing that haven't before, it's likely that the admin of that mail server needs to get with it and adjust their settings.

Kris Dougherty | Deliverability & Operations