On 2011-03-08 22:28, Joseph Brennan wrote:
http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Spamhaus%20DBL#291
quote,
One way to address this problem would have been to treat URL shortener
domains the same way as any other spammed domain and include them in our
main DBL zone. But, as mentioned, most of these URL shortener serve a
legitimate purpose and are used in non-spam emailings. Spamhaus has
always worked to avoid the blocklisting of assets that would cause
unjustified false positives.
I'll never grasp why one would use one of those in mail.
I thought there was consense to educate users *not* to visit links they
don't know and now we hear that something which hides potential danger
is ok to be used?
In fact Spamhaus *has* been treating them the same as other domains,
and causing false positives on shorteners widely used for legitimate
purposes, such as bit.ly, tinyurl.com, fly2.ws, and is.gd.
ever though of doing uridnsbl_skip_domain for those "Open Relay 2.0" you
consider "legitimate"?
But they've been doing it on the IP-based SBL, not the domain name
list. I hope the IP blocks for shorteners will stop. It's degraded
the quality of SBL, which in the past was so accurate on spammer-owned
hosts that we were willing to 550 based on a match.
I could see scoring for shorteners. So this is good news.
As soon as this data is widespread, they won't be abused any longer and
new smaller sites will take over, In fact, they already are.
At the moment its owl.ly and durl.me being massively hammered. As soon
as they get their homework done, it'll be someone else.
