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/