Saturday, February 25, 2012

Spam Cannibal DNSBL spews false positives. Why Spam Cannibal Sucks.


If you are a system administrator thinking of adding Spam Cannibal's DNSBL to your arsenal, think again.  This list is the equivalent of using a chain saw to remove a small mole.  They block entire ranges of IP addresses. You will have to nurse this black list and constantly check for false positives.

Don't believe me. Read this thread from administrators discussing why spam cannibal sucks.

Then read this one.

And this one.

If you are on the receiving end of Spam Cannibal's bullshit, where important emails are lost just because someone you are not even associated with who is a few IP addresses away from you may have once sent a spam message, it just really sucks.

Spam Cannibal lies when they say, "The ONLY way you can get into SpamCannibal's database is by sending spam or virus ladened email to our mail servers!"

But then in their next sentence, they contradict this by saying that they block "IP addresses and ranges that have sent or relayed what we believe to be spam or other unsolicited email directly to our email servers."  So in fact, you don't have to send spam... you only have to have the misfortune of having been assigned an IP address near a spammer.

Spam Cannibal lacks the attention to detail that better lists have.  They really don't care who they hurt. They don't respect the importance of your user's communications.  They even don't provide a way to remove your IP address from this list, which is a huge failure of this DNSBL.  Clearly, they just don't give a rats ass.

If you value your time as a system administrator and your user's ability to receive email, then dump Spam Cannibal. Their approach is too random, too sporadic and unpredictable to be consistently useful. Sure Spam Cannibal keeps spam at bay, but so does just shutting off email.

There are better solutions than to use this DNSBL's careless nuclear approach to fighting email spam.



8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen. I hate Spam Cannibal. False positives for me were upwards of .5%, which is a huge number of legitimate emails. My users would rather delete a few spam messages than to miss an important email from a buyer.

Anonymous said...

If you are ever listed, you will NEVER get off of spam cannibal. They don't answer email, I don't think they even read it. There's just nobody home. It must be on auto-pilot, so even if you do everything right, I don't think you will ever get off of this shit list.

Jack Arrow said...

Spam Cannibal is a shit. I hate it with all of my heart. My ip got just listed ONLY in that bullshit database without any reason and it's creating a huge damage to my customers. I think best rbls are spamhaus and barracudacentral. Maybe I'll never get unlisted so I'm forced to change ip subnet, by PAYING a lot.

Anonymous said...

So, I'm not the only one dealing with this joke of a BL. They claim I have no rDNS which is bull****.

Anonymous said...

I let the last comment, but I feel like I should follow up. I never expected to be de-listed by spam cannibal based on all the bad things I've read about their BL. That said, they did de-list me less than 24 hours after making the request. I should have never been listed in the first place, but they do apparently address complaints.

Anonymous said...

2014, spam cannibal is still shit. any company using it is crazy.

Anonymous said...

Sure Spam Cannibal keeps spam at bay, but so does just shutting off email.

THIS ^^

Thanks for taking my comment and not requiring a freaking login.

Anonymous said...

11/2017 - JUst disovered I'm on this list. How much BS is their claim that "you must have sent a spam to our email address"? 100% BS. I have run a double optin newsletter since 2003. You can't get on my list without first entering your email, second receiving a confirmation email and third clicking a link to confirm signing up. They either accepted the confirmation by clicking the link or they are full of shit.