For historical reasons, the SURBL public nameservers were serving individual lists ab, sc, ob and ws in addition to multi. However these individual lists have all been deprecated in favor of multi for several years since multi contains all lists. Traffic for the individual lists is relatively very low, and no one should be using them any more, so in order to reduce unnecessary and redundant network traffic we will be turning off public nameservice for the individual lists on February 28th, 2009.
Everyone should be using multi.surbl.org instead, and this has been the case for many years now. Therefore if anyone is using the individual lists, please stop doing so and use multi instead. A single query to multi will check all SURBL lists.
http://www.surbl.org/lists.html
Cheers,
Jeff C.