blacklist.cf needs to die (was Re: Help figuring our why SA is taking like 1.5 minutes to filter...)

Matt Kettler writes:
> > I also use RulesDuJour daily to get updated cf files.
> >
> From your debug output:
>
> [18696] dbg: config: read file /etc/mail/spamassassin/blacklist-uri.cf
> [18696] dbg: config: read file /etc/mail/spamassassin/blacklist.cf
>
> Ditch blacklist and blacklist-uri. These two are well known ways to
> kill spamassassin on all but the absolute most beastly machines money
> can buy. (i.e.: I wouldn't consider it in even a low volume environment
> with less than 8 gigs of ram and the fastest processors money can buy.
> Even then it might not run very well.)
>
> They really shouldn't be in RDJ anymore, as these are really only useful
> as a research tool now days. The blacklist-uri is also 100% replaced by
> the WS list in surbl.org. The plain blacklist file lists From:
> addresses, which is interesting, but not very useful in real spam
> fighting due to the high frequency of forgery (and certainly not worth
> the absurd hardware requirements needed to run it well).

OK, we really need to figure out some way to kill these FAQs off. Every week, someone asks a question about why SpamAssassin is killing their server, and most of the time the answer is "stop using blacklist.cf and blacklist-uri.cf". If 1 person is asking the question, chances are there's another 10 people who aren't asking, and who are just ditching SpamAssassin entirely. :(

RDJ folks -- can you zero out, or remove, those two files from the list entirely? It doesn't seem to matter if we say "don't use them" on our websites, people will set up RDJ to download everything anyway it seems.

I think I'll add a new question right on the top of the FAQ list about this...

What else can we do?

--j. Received on Fri Oct 26 07:53:31 2007