On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 16:13 +0100, Mike Cardwell wrote: > Marc Perkel wrote: > > > http://www.sdsc.edu/~jeff/spam/cbc.html > > > > It appears from Jeff's Blacklists Compared list the Barracuda has > > overtaken spamhaus for the #1 position. Not sure about the accuracy of > > the list as compared to spamhaus but seams reasonably good to me. I > > don't really count apews myself since they are extremely bad, but my > > hostkarma list is next beating out abuseat, sorbs, and uceprotect. > > > > Thanks to everyone who is helping me with my tarbaby project to catch > > virus bots. > > > > http://wiki.junkemailfilter.com/index.php/Project_tarbaby > > > > Congrats to Barracuda! > > The comparisons on that page are useless. What matters is list policy, > reliability and reputation. > > SpamHaus is hands down the best dnsbl. > > I used to be extremely distrustful of SpamCop, but they seem to be a lot > more reliable than they used to be and in my list they would come second. > > Barracuda is way down the list because of its poor reputation, and when > I tested it last it seemed to generate a fair few false positives. I > still let spamassassin use it for a small score value though. > > Hostkarmas whitelist hits on a lot of spam, so that makes me generally > distrustful of the quality of the contents of all of the hostkarma > lists. I still use them sensibly in my own SpamAssassin configuration > though for applying low scores. > The final thought I had on this is the Barracuda List is OT. It's not used in SA and I hope it never will be. The only SA connection is that Barracuda use SA in their appliances.
The false positive/accuracy is a subject raised time and time again with the Barracuda List. As for a listing policy I can only say it appears to be the work of Mickey Mouse. I recall the UK T2, Adam Light, trying to run through their evidence database to tell a 'spammer' why he was listed, only to find they actually had no evidence at all from the IP concerned. Once you cobble this with the listing of Name Servers and the IP's for the A records of newly registered domains (they seem to make up 'policy' as they go along) it really is all a bit unreliable IMHO. The reasons they want to big it up is because, as Barracuda's Steve Paeo said words similar to "The circle of increasing returns ... the more people we can get to use it, the better our data becomes, so the more people want to use it". Easy fix, don't use it....
