Who did resurrect will-spam-for-food?
A loooong time ago (was it 15 years ago?), two friends and I created the will-spam-for-food.eu.org DNSBL, also knows as WSFF. WSFF was a honeypot based system whose aim was to prevent massive spams from reaching their victims by catching and blocking the sender IP address early in the process. The system was first written in Ruby, a very young language at this time, then rewritten in Python because using threads in the 64 bits SparcLinux Ruby was very hazardous then and led to frequent crashes.
A few years later, we had no time to do the routine WSFF maintenance anymore, and decided to shutdown the blacklist. We even unregistered the domain name to make sure that noone would continue to use a stale copy of the blacklist. All went well, until today: I received several emails from site administrators complaining that their site has been added to the WSFF blacklist and asking for a removal. I am still waiting for full reports in order to understand what is currently happening.
Let me be clear about that: the WSFF blacklist does not exist anymore and has not existed for years. Whoever tells you you have been added to this blacklist either is a liar or runs a badly configured email system. Sending removal requests is useless as we cannot remove you from a non-existent blacklist.
Note: I will redirect the old contact URL to this post so that system administrators can see this.
Update 1 (2012-01-22 10:00 UTC): all traces point to MXToolBox, a company that monitor the blacklists for its customers. I have contacted them on Twitter and on their two contact email addresses to let them know they are crying wolf. If you have received such a bogus notification, do not hesitate to send them this page address.
Update 2 (2012-01-22 17:30 UTC): according to the commenter Kristy C below, MXToolBox stated that they would be removing WSFF from their list.
Update 3 (2012-01-23 15:00 UTC): an engineer at MxToolBox commented below that WSFF has been disabled in their tool.