[epub] news.admin.net-abuse.sightings and spammer databases

[epub@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Can anyone provide some insight into the listings in the Google group
news.admin.net-abuse.sightings? My understanding is that people can
forward emails to the group that they consider to be spam, though the
veracity of the claims is not verified just because messages appear in
the group. Right so far?

What really confuses me is the following. I've been testing email
service providers. EZezine, which is small but seems very well run, had
no spam reports in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. During my tests using
Ezezine's service, I was completely unable to send to AOL. Subsequently,
EZezine has publicly announced major issues with filtering in general,
to the point where it sounds like their business is threatened.

NetAtlantic, a larger, more multi-faceted list/email/hosting service
provider, has MANY listings in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. Yet my
initial tests show no filtering problems when NetAtlantic tries to send
mail to AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail accounts. This would seem to give the
reports in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings little value as a predictor of
a company's ability to deliver emails without getting filtered. 

I also looked up the two companies in three IP/spammers databases.
EZEzine was listed once in two of the databases and four times in the
other. Ditto for NetAtlantic. Neither was listed in Spamhaus or Spamcop.
So again, I don't see how these tools are useful predictors of whether a
company will be able to deliver the mail. 

Maybe I'm looking at the data the wrong way. Before I continute my
evaluation of these and other companies, help would be  appreciated in
trying to understand how to process spammer data.

Thanks,
Mark

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