osuosl.org and Spamhaus PBL

[Laurent Bercot]

  Hello,

  The latest message I sent to the list was blocked by the busybox.net MX
because my IP was listed in the SpamHaus PBL - that means it is a dynamic
address provided by my ISP, which it indeed is. Mail servers that
reject mail based on a PBL listing basically enforce the use of the
provider's SMTP server and disallow use of the customer's own SMTP
server.

  I have my own SMTP server. It works, it has always worked, and if it
doesn't work, I can fix it. I do not want to use my ISP's SMTP server
for several reasons:
  - If at some point I want to encrypt my mail, I want it to be done
between my server and the recipient's server, not between my server
and my ISP's. I don't want to allow my ISP to read my mail.
  - My ISP is made of incompetent morons who have no idea what
customer service is, how the Internet works or how to configure or
scale a service. Every mail I send through them sits in their queue
for several minutes. The previous mail I sent had this charming
header in it:
  X-Greylist: delayed 00:06:59 by SQLgrey-1.7.6
(so it wasn't actually incompetence in this case, it was intentional
disservice.)

  The PBL is part of a larger tendency to disempower individual users
and put that power into the ISP's hands, which comes with a very
unsavory smell of surveillance, breach of net neutrality, and also
user infantilization and deresponsabilization.

  It's the first time I get a bounce based on a PBL listing, and
the busybox.net MX is the first MX giving me such a bounce. I have
to say it is a major disappointment coming from such a list.
  I noticed in the headers that the osuosl.org servers were actually
hosting the list. So it looks like osuosl.org implements PBL
blacklisting.

  It's the first time I send a mail to the Busybox list and it is
rejected by PBL, so either the list hosting was switched to osuosl.org
very recently, or they added the "feature" recently. Would it be
envisionable to either switch hostings again, or persuade osuosl.org
to roll this back (one can hope) ?

  I want to think that busybox.net people are technically savvy,
responsible people who dislike this kind of disempowerment as much as
I do, and that my plea will fall on listening, understanding ears.

  Thanks.

  (osuosl.org homepage: "The Open Source Lab is an organization working
for the advancement of open source technologies."
  They forgot to mention "without consideration as to how they are
applied.")

-- 
  Laurent