On Thursday, October 7, 2004, 5:55:07 AM, Rob McEwen wrote:
Jeff,
I did the test as promised. So far, I have collected two hams and 37 spams when manually filtering on this list. (The spams include many which are duplicates where the spammer sent a batch of spams to various clients of mine). I sorted these via a quick manual judgment-call, but I'll research and double-check these more as I get time.
Here are the two FPs:
jjkeller.com (see http://www.pvsys.com/jjkeller.txt ) This was a domain name contained with a newsletter which appears to be legitimate. I showed this to my client who was the intended recipient. He said that he didn't recall subscribing to it, but he felt like it was a legitimate and informative newsletter for his industry and he said he desired to receive it. (I know, a bit weak... but still should be consider for whitelisting??). Does anyone else know anything about jjkeller.com ??
All the domains in that newsletter look like legitimate sellers of industrial safety equipment and hardly spam candidates:
msha.gov stevenspublishing.com ohsonline.com lss.com apbuck.com huserinc.com jjkeller.com
The only "controversial" one might be:
processrequest.com
which appears in newsletters a lot and belongs to a marketing company that we already whitelisted.
Therefore I've whitelisted all of the above, including jjkeller.com, the source of which is:
/home/wstearns/black-wstearns-2004-07:jjkeller.com /home/wstearns/black-wstearns-2004-07:jjkellermail.com /home/wstearns/black-wstearns-hand-checked:jjkellermail.com /home/wstearns/black-wstearns-hand-checked-2004-07:jjkellermail.com /home/wstearns/black-wstearns-sa-blacklist.200406281446.domains:jjkeller.com /home/wstearns/black-wstearns-sa-blacklist.200406281446.domains:jjkellermail.com
associateprograms.com (see http://www.pvsys.com/associateprograms.txt ) This is a very reputable site for teaching people how to make a living from affiliate advertising. It is very white-hat and does NOT encourage people to spam or to harvest addresses. It encourages use of legitimate opt-in advertising, building web sites, and using pay-per-clicks to advertise affiliate links. It probably got listed due to an open loop signup form (but I'm just speculating). There is a link on this site called "Want to fool spam filters?" ...don't let this link fool you. This page is really about dealing with filters which are out of control, block legitimate mail, and where the mail provider is unwilling to whitelist trusted sender/receiver combos and unwilling to explain why any particular message got blocked.
This bunch is more uncertain since they're all possible spam candidates:
mp3dollars.com associateprograms.com affiliatesuccess.net liutilities.com webmastersreference.com payperclicksearchengines.com lifetimecustomers.com lifetimecommissions.com
however only associateprograms.com is currently listed. Looks like it came probably into WS from BigEvil:
/web/antispam/bigevil.domains:associateprograms.com /home/wstearns/black-wstearns-sa-blacklist.200406281446.domains:associateprograms.com
1998 domain, no SBL, but 10 NANAS. Given the few NANAS reports I'd agree they could be a legitimate affiliate program that gets a little abuse.
I'm going to go ahead and whitelist them, but would like to get feedback from anyone with additional comments.
I'll keep sending this FP stuff from this list as I receive it in my custom filter... and, when I get more time, I'll (also) send a list and a link to the stuff that I deemed as spam.
Yes, please keep finding any that you find.
Jeff C. -- "If it appears in hams, then don't list it."