[tor-talk] Tor and Spamhaus.

[malte at wk3.org]

Quoting blobby at openmailbox.org (2016-08-12 14:18:16)
> Yet most blacklisting services do not consider exit nodes to be dubious.
> 
> This situation would not be an issue except for the popularity of 
> Spamhaus.
> 
> Question: why does Spamhaus in particular target exit nodes?

As far as I can tell Spamhaus has a de-facto monopoly on email
blocklists. So maybe others don't have the Tor exits in their lists
because they don't matter?


> Does this 
> have an effect on Tor users?

Yes. This means you cannot host a mail server and make it deliver email
over Tor, similar how you cannot host a mail server at home, because all
the end-user IP addresses are listed by Spamhau as well.

(This is different from having your mail client (e.g. Thunderbird)
connect to your mail server over Tor, these connections usually are
_not_ blocked.)


> How is Spamhaus actually used?

To filter mailserver-to-mailserver connections.

> For example, 
> if I go to Craigslist and can't use the website  and get "This IP has 
> been automatically blocked" or when I login to Gmail I am forced to 
> verify myself, is this related to Spamhaus' blacklisting?

No. web/HTTP(S) traffic is filtered by other companies. Most notoriously
Cloudflare. But there are others as well. What makes them worse, is,
that they usually don't just provide blocklists, but do
man-in-the-middle the whole HTTP(S) traffic.


Sincerely,

Malte