Announce April 2004

announce@lists.surbl.org

3 participants
27 discussions

ANNOUNCE: SURBL DNS thanks, sa.surbl.org removal
by Jeff Chan 27 Apr '04

27 Apr '04

The SURBL community, including developers, users, fans and all would like to thank the people and networks who have volunteered to carry our SURBL zones on their public name servers. In no particular order, they are: Kelsey Cummings and sonic.net Raymond Dijkxhoorn and tudelft.nl Bill Stearns and pa.net Erik O'Connor and littleredbat.net/supranet.net Dave Funk and icaen.uiowa.edu Doc Schneider and maddoc.com Mark Reynolds and telstra.net David Coulson and davidcoulson.net Richard Zuidhof and zonnet.nl Daryl Jones and smrn.com Vincent Schonau and xs4all.nl Left off this list are some specific network and facilities providers where some of the name servers are located, so we'll leave it to our friends to forward our thanks to them. This project would not be possible without our great public DNS servers thus far, so our hearty thanks go out to everyone helping to get the SURBL data out. We also encourage anyone else with DS3 or faster network connections to consider helping us provide DNS for these zones. Interest in using SURBLs is ramping up from many different projects and people, but when SpamAssassin 3.0 comes out in a few months with its built-in support for SURBLs, the DNS traffic will probably jump significantly. So we could probably still use some more help with DNS. Please let us know if you can help. Expect DNS traffic to max out around 1 or 2 Megabits per second if things really take off. Also the more servers we have the less traffic each one does, so a larger community helps to share the load! ************************************************************* We also want to strongly encourage any high-volume users of SURBLs to set up local caching name servers for the zones in order to offload the public name servers. Probably the best way to do this is with rbldnsd and rsync, though BIND versions of the zone files are also available via rsync. Please contact Raymond at rsync at surbl dot org with your name server's IP address in order to get rsync access. This will help keep the load on the public name servers reasonable, and it's also good engineering practice since it will get you the best performance for using SURBLs. To re-iterate, if you're running a high volume mail server, please do your SURBL queries from your local name server by pulling the zones using rsync and not from the public servers. Thanks! ************************************************************* Also, we'd like to remind all SURBL users that the name of the SURBL list derived from Bill Stearns' sa-blacklist has changed from sa.surbl.org to ws.surbl.org. If you are using the old name please change your configs to use the new name. After checking that DNS traffic for the old name is minimal, we are ceasing DNS service on the old name now, so use ws.surbl.org now! The different SURBL lists are described at our site: http://www.surbl.org/ Please forward this message to any interested parties. It seems to be getting more difficult to keep in contact with everyone using SURBLs, so a little help getting the word out could be useful. Thanks everyone! Jeff C. -- Jeff Chan mailto:jeffc@surbl.org http://www.surbl.org/

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[SURBL-Announce] ANNOUNCE: rbldnsd zone file names changing slightly; zone files only update when needed
by Jeff Chan 25 Apr '04

25 Apr '04

4/24/04: In order to prevent future confusion, we are changing the names of the rbldnsd zone files from .rbldns to .rbldnsd . If you are using rbldnsd, please update your rsync and cron configs to use the slightly revised .rbldnsd names. For now both old and new names are being served, but we may want to stop serving the deprecated names at some point in future. If you're using the old names, please update to the new ones. We expect the new names to be stable. The changes to the rbldnsd zone file names are: sc.surbl.org.rbldns --> sc.surbl.org.rbldnsd ws.surbl.org.rbldns --> ws.surbl.org.rbldnsd be.surbl.org.rbldns --> be.surbl.org.rbldnsd (For background, there are two RBL name server programs with similar names but different functionality: rbldnsd and rbldns. Zone files for the two programs do not share the same syntax. But they are similar enough to cause potential confusion.) 4/24/04: Zone files now only update when the underlying spam URI domains have changed. The latter change means there are fewer unnecessary zone transfers, but could potentially affect anyone who was looking at the zone file serial numbers or file times as a status flag or heartbeat. Jeff C. -- Jeff Chan mailto:jeffc@surbl.org http://www.surbl.org/

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ANNOUNCE: The SARE SURBL+ Checker v0.4
by Jeff Chan 23 Apr '04

23 Apr '04

[Linked from the surbl site also... -- Jeff C.] From: Dallas L. Engelken To: spamassassin-users, spamassassin-dev Date: Thursday, April 22, 2004, 3:13:23 PM Subject: ANNOUNCE: The SARE SURBL+ Checker v0.4 http://www.rulesemporium.com/cgi-bin/uribl.cgi - domain and ip lookups for sc/ws/be.surbl.org - ip lookups for standard txt based rbls found in SA

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[SURBL-Announce] ADVISORY: Please set up local DNS servers for high volume mail servers
by Jeff Chan 23 Apr '04

23 Apr '04

For folks processing more than a a few hundred thousand messages per day, please set set up a local caching name server for any of the RBLs you are using, including SURBLs. This is considered a standard, good practice since it offloads the public name servers. A very popular and fast name server specifically meant for serving up RBLs is rbldnsd: http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/rbldnsd.html SURBL zone files are available in rbldnsd format. Then arrange with the RBLs to get rsync access to their zone files. Since rsync only transmits differences, the zone files are kept updated in a very efficient manner. For example to get rsync access to SURBL zone files, please contact Raymond at rsync at surbl dot org. Other RBLs have similar procedures for gaining rsync access. Then configure your mail servers using RBLs to query your local forwarding RBL name server. Thanks, Jeff C. P.S. Please don't grab zone files from our web site for production or even hobbyist mail servers, as I see some people apparently doing right now. I want to say that's really lame, but that would be rude. ;-) -- Jeff Chan mailto:jeffc@surbl.org http://www.surbl.org/

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ANNOUNCE: Mail::SpamAsssassin::SpamCopURI 0.14
by Eric Kolve 23 Apr '04

23 Apr '04

Release 0.14 is up on sourceforge.net. Sorry about all these releases. This is just a small one to fix the 'Modification of non-creatable array value attempted' error a few people have been seeing. You can fetch it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/spamcopuri --eric

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ANNOUNCE: Mail::SpamAsssassin::SpamCopURI 0.13
by Eric Kolve 23 Apr '04

23 Apr '04

I have just released SpamCopURI 0.13. This release adds some basic query caching as well as registrar based lookups against the RBL. Instead of querying for both the 2nd and 3rd level domain we are now only querying for the 2nd OR the 3rd based on the TLD. Let me know if you see any issues with this: false positives, misses that should be hits, etc. We are now caching the query results on a per test basis so multiple URLs to the same to domain should only get checked once per RBL. There is also a change that fixes a compile error under Perl 5.005 reported on this list. Open redirect resolution is still off by default. I would like to hear how this has worked out for those that have enabled it. Do you think its safe enough to enabled it by default? The latest release can be retrieved from http://sourceforge.net/projects/spamcopuri --eric

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[SURBL-Announce] ANNOUNCE: BigEvil.cf and MidEvil.cf are now available in SURBL form as be.surbl.org
by Jeff Chan 22 Apr '04

22 Apr '04

BigEvil.cf and MidEvil.cf are now available in SURBL form as be.surbl.org, for use with SpamCopURI SpamAssassin 2.63 and URIDNSBL SpamAssassin 3.0 plugins. Thanks Chris, Paul and Gary Funck! Here's an excerpt about the new list from the Quick Start section: http://www.surbl.org/ Chris Santerre and Paul Barbeau's BigEvil and MidEvil SpamAssassin rules are now available as an SURBL for use with plugins and programs such as those mentioned above which can extract message body URI domains and compare them against name-based RBLs. The name of the list is be.surbl.org, and some sample rules and scores to use it appears below. The well-known and popular BigEvil and MidEvil SA rulesets are used to block messages based on domains that have occurred in spam message body URIs. Using this as an SURBL instead allows you to remove this relatively large ruleset from SA memory and lets DNS cache the data in a zone file instead, querying SURBL hits from DNS as needed. An SA 2.63 rule and score using SpamCopURI (but not the SpamCop data!) looks like this: uri BE_URI_RBL eval:check_spamcop_uri_rbl('be.surbl.org','127.0.0.2') describe BE_URI_RBL URI's domain appears in BigEvil tflags BE_URI_RBL net score BE_URI_RBL 3.0 An SA 3.0 rule and score using URIBL's urirhsbl looks like this: urirhsbl URIBL_BE_SURBL be.surbl.org. A header URIBL_BE_SURBL eval:check_uridnsbl('URIBL_BE_SURBL') describe URIBL_BE_SURBL Contains a URL listed BigEvil tflags URIBL_BE_SURBL net score URIBL_BE_SURBL 3.0 be.surbl.org can be used alone or with other SURBL lists; all that's needed are different rule and score names, as we've shown in the samples. More information about be.surbl.org can be found in the Additional SURBLs section. http://www.surbl.org/additional.html be.surbl.org joins Bill Stearns' sa-blacklist-based ws.surbl.org and my own SpamCop URI-based sc.surbl.org SURBLs. All are described more at the site. Please send me any questions, comments, corrections, updates, etc. Cheers, Jeff C. P.S. We will probably offer a combined list at some point. We're still working out the details of that. Until then it's quite possible to use one or more of the lists simply by using separate SA rules for each one that you want to use, as shown in the Quick Start samples. P.P.S. The sample rules have been updated to mention "SpamCop" only in the descriptions of rules that actually use SpamCop data. -- Jeff Chan mailto:jeffc@surbl.org http://www.surbl.org/

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ANNOUNCE: Mail::SpamAsssassin::SpamCopURI 0.12
by Eric Kolve 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

Just release 0.12 to fix a test some users may have had errors with during make test. No real need to grab this unless you want a clean make test. --eric

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ANNOUNCE: Mail::SpamAsssassin::SpamCopURI 0.11
by Eric Kolve 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

I have just released SpamCopURI version 0.11. This fixes a few bugs that had been reported and adds open redirect resolution. This basically takes a URL from say rd.yahoo.com and attempts to resolve the Location header without ever fetching from the potential spammy site. Only the URLs that have hosts that match an address list get redirect resolution. As well, redirect resolution is off by default, but can be enabled in the conf file. I have placed several open redirect sites in the conf file. The basic requirement is that the redirect return a 300 level HTTP response when fetching. I placed google.com in there even though they don't have their own redirect domain, but this should be fairly safe since most if not all google URLs are either redirects or searches. Give it a try and tell me what you think. This is all dependent upon LWP, but if you don't have LWP everything else will function as it did before. I have removed all the deprecated tests that depended on local Storable data. See the INSTALL file for information about upgrading from a previous version. There is also a bit more information about installation that should help those that had trouble in the past. --eric

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SURBL testpoint changed, TXT records shortened
by Jeff Chan 21 Apr '04

21 Apr '04

Here are a couple changes to the SURBL testpoints and TXT records: http://www.surbl.org/news.html 4/20/04: SURBL testpoints "example.com" have been changed to "surbl-org-permanent-test-point.com" to avoid potential spam detection on sample URIs. So the SURBL testpoints are now: Name: test.sc.surbl.org.sc.surbl.org (with ws for sc, etc.) Address: 127.0.0.2 Name: test.surbl.org.sc.surbl.org Address: 127.0.0.2 Name: 2.0.0.127.sc.surbl.org Address: 127.0.0.2 Name: surbl-org-permanent-test-point.com.sc.surbl.org Address: 127.0.0.2 4/20/04: TXT record for sc.surbl.org is changed from: "Message body contains recently and multiply-reported SpamCop spamvertised domain." to: "Message body contains SpamCop spamvertised domain." TXT record for ws.surbl.org is changed from: "Message body contains domain in sa-blacklist. See: http://www.stearns.org/sa-blacklist/" to: "Blocked, See: http://www.stearns.org/sa-blacklist/". Please update any test suites, rules, configs and other code accordingly. We expect these to be (more) stable. :-) (The default/sample SA 2.63 SpamCopURI and SA 3.0 urirhsbl rules seem to write their own text descriptions based on the A record, so these changes probably do not affect most SpamAssassin users of SURBLs. Other applications may need to make adjustments if they were using the TXT records.) Jeff C. -- Jeff Chan mailto:jeffc@surbl.org http://www.surbl.org/

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Announce April 2004