Re: Advice on MTA blacklist

Also, psbl.surriel.com has gotten much better in recent months. It used to have occasional FPs, but I haven't seen any in a while. In my own spam filtering, I merely score on RBLs and I don't outright block... but if I were a large ISP which didn't have that luxury, I'd probably use the following five RBLs for outright blocking:

• zen
• dsbl
• spamcop (now that it has improved)
• psbl (now that it has improved)
• ivmSIP.com (mine)

(njabl **almost** made the cut... I'd take a close look second look at that one)

All five of these are safe for outright blocking... if one doesn't mind having a tiny fraction of a percent of FPs ...combined, I'm guessing that these five lists probably produce **LESS** than 1/10 of 1% FPs... most of which would be due to misconfigured small office servers spewing spam or backscatter and stuff like that where some of the legit mail from the SAME IPs also gets blocked... but no egregious mistakes or large MTAs blocked by these.

There is no other list out there that comes close to these five lists in terms of low FPs combined with "relevancy"... that being, does that one list still block a decent percentage of **additional** spam even if the other four lists were already in use prior to adding that fifth list. Lists that have zero FPs, but don't find any additional Spammer's IPs didn't make that list.

Rob McEwen wrote:
> John Rudd wrote:
>> Spamcop: no. Don't use them as an MTA RBL. I'm leery of even using
>> them as a SA RBL, but it's a very bad idea to use them as an MTA RBL
>> (too many false positives).
> Actually, sometime in the past several months, SpamCop's FP rate
> dropped dramatically. I'm not privy to the inside details, but they
> must have made some dramatic changes. Therefore, whatever bad FP
> reputation they've earned over the years should be erased and they
> should be reassessed.
>
> Rob McEwen
>
>
Received on Tue Oct 9 14:01:36 2007