Talk:Anonymous Postmaster Early Warning System

POV issues

APEWS lists at present approximately 40 percent of routable IPV4 address space, including, for instance, 12.0.0.0/9 (AS7018 AT&T WorldNet Services), rendering it useless in a production environment for simple blocking (accept/reject).

This statement seems to be inherently POV. However, I can't seem to find any pro-APEWS (or even neutral) sources on the internet to balance this out. I've seen various figures as to what percentage of IPv4 address space is blocked by APEWS, like 38%, 42%, half, one-third, etc, and no doubt this has changed over time, but I have yet to see an unbiased report on this. Given that spam comprises >90% of all e-mail sent, perhaps it is not unreasonable to block such a large amount of address space. Also what exactly is a "production environment"? Is that a business-speak term for a mission-critical environment where not a single false positive would be acceptable?

Obviously enough mail admins are using APEWS that the damage is considerable when someone's mail server ends up in listed IP address space, but apparently most of those that use the list are keeping quiet about it.

I would like to improve this article, but the information out there about APEWS seems to be scanty and biased. Deepmath (talk) 06:22, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Most of the information is found in newsgroups like news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting, which has participation by administrators from some rather large networks. While the statement above seems biased, it's true, although it could be phrased more neutrally. APEWS doesn't have value for simple blocking (far too many false positives), but it does have value for tagging, to provide a weighting to some other filter that decides whether or not to reject the mail.

The damage isn't "considerable" when someone's mail server ends up listed. There's practically no damage at all, because there is zero evidence that any large network uses APEWS for blocking. Thus far, in the face of many requests on news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting, only one or two people have managed to produce a reject message implicating APEWS. Most people who complain about being listed found out about their listing in other ways. Rarely is APEWS ever used for blocking. =Axlq 02:28, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

I guess it kind of goes back to my earlier comment that "apparently most of those that use the list are keeping quiet about it." It doesn't mean much to say that people use it for tagging rather than blocking. For example, someone could use the APEWS list to tag the message, and then find any other reason or excuse whatever to block it. Why tell spammers exactly how your filter works? Or if the APEWS list is way too aggressive for outright blocking, its complement can be used as somewhat of a whitelist to help reduce false positives. But no spam filter is perfect, and if APEWS is used at all by big network operators, it is going to cause some e-mail to be rejected from listed IP address space that would otherwise get through. Deepmath (talk) 04:24, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Dead?

Looks like the APEWS site no longer exists. --FOo (talk) 07:39, 25 September 2008 (UTC)