Q: Remove me from your list!!! NOW!!!
A:
First of all, stop yelling. It won't help you anyway.
The second step towards getting removed is to understand what exactly
happened to you. If you find your address in one of the working
zones, than it is completely senseless to try to contact the owner of
such a zone. And it is twice stupid to contact the maintainer of this or
other DRBL sites, because we doesn't have any authority on the other DRBL
node's zones. Don't try to reach any 'chief DRBL administrator' because
there's no such officer in DRBL project. In fact, there's no central power
here at all. If you're confused, try reading the rest of this FAQ.
Well now to the point. If you really want to get off the DRBL lists,
what you need is to find out which voteing zones are listing you.
These are the only hand-written and human-controlled sources where your
address come to the other zones from. Once you're done, contact the
people responsible for these zones.
Click here for the list of known zones and their
respective contacts. But you are strongly encouraged to check the
next question before doing so.
Q: I'm not a spammer, why do they list me?
A:
The DRBL project's main mission is to provide a mechanism to share local
filters written for particular mail servers by their administrators.
There are very different sites in the project, from large ISPs to
private hobbysts' mailers. Each administrator has his/her own policies
and considerations on what he/she doesn't want to accept. The only limitation
is that the administrator must use his own zone himself. But you
don't really need to be a spammer to get to someone's local filter. It's
not an abuse to make a filter: when you own a server, it is your
right and your privilege to make decisions what mail to accept and what
to reject. Noone is forced to use anyone's voting zone, it's a
matter of trust and private considerations. But noone can be forced
not to use any filters as well.
This mean you can't demand to remove your address. You only
can ask to do so. Please keep it in mind contacting the DRBL
zones' administrators.
Q: How does it work?
A:
The network decided to use DRBL should carry two DNS zones - voting
(hereafter VOTE) and working (hereafter WORK) usually called
vote.drbl.<domain>.<tld> and
work.drbl.<domain>.<tld>.
Banned networks and hosts should be put into VOTE zone
as a pair of A and TXT records - e.g.:
*.57.168.192 IN A 127.0.0.2
IN TXT "Spammers network blocked"
This blocks mail from 192.168.57.0/24 network giving "Spammers
network blocked" as a comment.
The next step is to set up policies used to generate
WORK zone.
You should decide which VOTE zones will be used and the measure of trust
to their administrators.
There should be a scalar value of weight assigned to
each zone and a threshold value, which is used to generate a
WORK zone.
Each address from one or more zones gives weight equal to a sum of
weights of all zones this address belongs to.
If the weight of an address is greater then or equal to a threshold
value, then the address is put to a WORK zone.
Suppose we maintain network-1.ru network and have
to use DRBL.
So we create vote.drbl.network-1.ru and work.drbl.network-1.ru .
Then we decide to generate our WORK zone using information from some
other networks - vote.drbl.network-2.ru, vote.drbl.network-3.ru,
vote.drbl.network-4.ru, vote.drbl.network-5.ru and vote.drbl.network-6.ru.
The administrator of network-2 is our old fellow and, therefore, a trusted
person.
Less known person is the administrator of network-3, so less we
trust, and finally, we don't know the administrators of
network-4 , network-5 and network-6, but there are no reasons for us
not to trust them (is there are such reasons, we simply won't
use their zones at all).
Then we decide to use a threshold value of 1 (or 100, to assign weights
in a percentage of trust, or some other value) and assign the
following weights to zones:
vote.drbl.network-1.ru 1
vote.drbl.network-2.ru 1
vote.drbl.network-3.ru 0.8
vote.drbl.network-4.ru 0.4
vote.drbl.network-5.ru 0.4
vote.drbl.network-6.ru 0.4
Now, if some address apears in our own VOTE zone vote.drbl.network-1.ru or
in a fully trusted VOTE zone vote.drbl.network-2.ru maintained by our
fellow, then this address will be automatically put in our WORK zone,
and incoming mail from this address will be rejected.
If some address is banned in network-3, it will not be put into
our WORK zone immediately - it's necessary for it to be banned in some
other network.
For example, if some address is banned in network-3 and network-5, then
its total weight will be 1.2 , which exceeds the threshold value.
In this case we suppose that blocking given address somewhere else
is a good reason to do the same.
Finally, if none of the network-1, network-2 or network-3 have blocked
some given address, then it will be put into our WORK zone only in case
of all three networks will vote for it.
Q: Why do I need it?
A:
Most networks have their own mail filters, and many administrators are ready
and wish to share the information with each other. DRBL, being the automated
decision-making system, is expected to help in this task. Also, being
distributed, DRBL can't become proprietary so you don't depend on any
particular organization or person.
Q: Why distributed?
A:
At primary decision, making the system distributed was intended to keep the
system from being vulnerable to the legal prosecution by the blocked spammers.
Under the conditions of law anarchy, it is practically useless to maintain
a centralized database - the higher is its popularity among the administrators
of mail servers, the greater are dissatisfyed spammers, whose addresses were
put in this database. It becomes necessary to be to ready to constant
expenditures for attorneys and judicial expenses - otherwise any spammer with
a big moneybag and a smart lawyers will be able to destroy the whole system.
Being distributed, DRBL lacks this problem.
In the majority of the cases there is noone to sue
(case "against all at once" can't be considered seriously) - moreover,
it's useless.
Anyone can block any mail within their own network, so anything
is legal.
As for other networks using such information, this is voluntary - DRBL has a
great amount of concurrent zones. Finally, if some node will be exterminated,
the whole system will keep its functionality.
Furthermore, the distributed system has other merits.
Its mechanism of automatic mutual consulting seems to be more flexible,
compared to the bureaucratized procedures of nominating spammers network
to centralyzed systems.
And if some network can't use a particular centralized database for political
reasons, there are no contras to use DRBL.
As opposed to proprietary information sources, where you have only two
alternatives (to use or not to use), DRBL has a number of
intermediate states, which could be acieved by using weights
which do not exceed threshold value.
Q:
Ok, I've made a voting zone. Are there any restrictions for what I can
put there?
A:
The only restriction is: your network must use your zone yourself.
Making this zone publicly accessible means "I don't accept mail from this
network". This assertion has substantially larger weight than "I don't like
this network".
Indeed, it would be very strange if someone has blocked mail
connectivity with some given network using your VOTE zone, but you didn't.
First of all, you should protect yourself.
Also you should realize that distribution of some VOTE zone which is not
used in originating network is an abuse.
Such practice will cause others to assign it low weight values,
therefore making it ineffective.
Even if you do really use your VOTE zone to filter incoming mail, you
should keep it with a sufficient degree of responsibility.
Q:
Well, I have set up my own DRBL node. What should I do to make it
available to other networks?
A:
You can contact one of the current DRBL members and ask to annonce your zone
to the others (please do not contact many of the DRBL members at once --
remember, they hate spam!). There's a closed mailing list used by several
of the DRBL members, any of them can annonce your zone to the (almost)
whole project.
Please include names of VOTE and WORK zones, address of name server
capable of AXFR zone transfer from any address, and the name of the
network your zone is used in.
Also it would be a good thing to describe your policy of creating the
VOTE zone.
Last advise: think before you do.
Only in that case your VOTE zone could be popular and have a respectable
weight.
Good luck!