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
