I think we can agree that SPAM is bad and IPv6 is good, well… at least we are encouraging people to adopt ipv6, right? … and self-hosting should be encouraged too.

Well, a large anti-spam conglomerate has blacklisted a /64 ipv6 range that my mail server happens to be in. It’s a bit surprising that they would do that intentionally, so I suspect they have an automatic escalating rule that automatically grows the size of a block rule. But it’s not too surprising that one’s address might fall into that range, as that space holds 18.4 quintillion unique addresses.

If I request that my specific ipv6 address be removed from the blacklist, the machines understand that the request targets removal of that /64 rule and will dutifully disable it… for a few seconds… enough time for any of the millions of live spammers in that range to send spam, then it instantly decides it needs that rule again and re-enables it.

Of course, there is no way to contact a HUMAN in an anti-spam shop (if you are not a paying customer, that is), as their whole business model is squelching noise that consumes productive time.

So it seems that I have two (potentially-overlapping) options:

  1. I can disable ipv6.

  2. I can find other ways to communicate to those people that I cannot email, to tell them their expensive anti-spam service SUCKS.