We are pleased to announce the availability of three new SURBL lists:

ob.surbl.org - OutBlaze spamvertised sites ab.surbl.org - AbuseButler spamvertised sites multi.surbl.org - Combined SURBL list

ob is a large list of about 20k spamvertised sites kindly provided by OutBlaze and based on data found in their spam traps. ob has a strong spam detection rate of around 70% and a low false positive rate around 0.1%. Only domains that have been registered within the past 90 days are included in ob.surbl.org and this "newness" requirement is probably one of the reasons for the low FP rate, given how quickly spammers use and must discard domains for their web sites.

ab is a smaller list of the top 425 or so spamvertised sites over the past 7 days kindly provided by AbuseButler:

http://spamvertised.abusebutler.com/

AbuseButler's data sources include SpamCop and native reports. In general philosophy and data processing styles, ab.surbl.org is similar to my own sc.surbl.org which is also based on SpamCop data, and the results of both lists are similar, but not identical.

multi is a bitmask-combined version of all of the other lists plus an anti-phishing list provided by Mail Security:

http://www.mailsecurity.net.au/

The latter is identified as "ph" and it is not available as a separate list as its size probably does not justify the resources of its own zone file, etc. However the data in ph is important since it represents sites likely to be criminally phishing for personal and financial information.

Because list membership in multi.surbl.org is encoded in a bitmasked fashion, results from multi need to be decoded into their constituent lists by programs such as urirhssub in SpamAssassin 3.X. Support for this decoding may be back-ported into the SpamAssassin 2.63 program for using SURBLs, SpamCopURI.

We expect that multi.surbl.org will become the list of choice for SURBL use going forward, due to the convenience of getting all list data in a single list, only needing to cache a single zone file, etc.

More information about the all SURBL lists can be found at:

http://www.surbl.org/lists.html

Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments about SURBLs on our discussion list at:

http://lists.surbl.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Please let us know about any false positives at:

whitelist at surbl dot org

Cheers,

Jeff C.