On Thursday, August 5, 2004, 12:36:02 AM, Joe Wein wrote:
Raymond and Jeff recently invited me to provide my data feed for SURBL. I agreed because anything that helps people block more spam is worth supporting. There was just one catch: more than a year ago I had started the list by seeding it with other people's lists, which in hindsight was not a good idea, as I couldn't vouch for all entries and occasionally had to drop entries. Recent entries (from early December 2003 onward) use a quite rigorous protocol that has served me well. I have had but a single complaint about more than 6000 domains from that data set.
Hi Joe, Welcome to the SURBL community, and thanks very much for sharing your data with us. I agree that sharing information about spam URI domains can help the Internet community in general to fight spam. Thanks also for your personal introduction and the background information on the data being used with and coming from jwSpamSpy.
As you know, Raymond is feeding the data from your blacklist into the SURBL list: ws.surbl.org. I had announced the change earlier, but it may be worth repeating that we are now using only the more recent entries which you describe above and which pass your rigorous new screening protocol from December 2003 onward. So we're currently probably getting only the best jwSpamSpy data into ws.surbl.org and have certainly eliminated a few false positives in the process. (I'd like to still ask people to provide any false positives or FP stats they have for ws or any of the lists.)
Like you, at this point one of our main concerns is reducing false positives, and in that sense your processing of the data from traps could be considered a good model of how such checking should be done. You may want to consider publishing that process if you haven't already.
Cheers, and Thanks again,
Jeff C.