[bobince]

FWIW: I block Hetzner.

They have an automated abuse-handling system that sends your complaint to the spammer and asks them politely to stop. This often works for small-time operation on a single IP address, and for compromised servers, but it's completely inadequate for dealing with large customers and rogue resellers spamming over large netblocks, and against darker-coloured-hat spammers engaging in reprisals.

Replying to the automated mails can get you through to a human, but their ops are stuck on a limited script so they're not really any more use than the automated systems. They have no interest in investigating wider patterns of abuse than a single spam from a single IP.

I regret having to blacklist but it's not worth the time and frustration of trying to engage with them.

[kuschku]

Considering you said you also block Amazon, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15494970, I don’t think your opinion will have much weight on this topic.

[bobince]

I don't aspire to weight, but I don't really know what you're getting at here - amazonses is commonly blocked as its abuse reporting is a brick wall, much worse than Hetzner who are at least trying, if ineffectively.

(Not talking about all of Amazon, just SES - AWS for example is a different animal.)

[kuschku]

Considering how many legitimate services are on SES, if you block SES you might as well go with a whitelist for email.

That’s what I’m trying to get at here.

[inimino]

Beating spam by playing whack-a-mole is a dead end, that ship sailed long, long ago.