Hi,
I have MDaemon installed and lately it has been working wonders to reject spam. However I've noticed that all it does is bounces the mail back to the person who supposedly sent it. Now we all know that it is almost always some innocent address or a fake address and so best case the bounce is pointless and worst case some innocent person is being bombarded with mails.
I'm relatively new to all this so please forgive me if this has been suggested before or indeed if it is simply possible with other mail servers. It occurs to me that we could list the various abuse addresses of the ISP hosting the black listed site and this could be returned when a match is found. If the server software then bounced the mail not to the sender but to the abuse address we would seriously start to affect these ISP's.
It seems to me this is not like the lycos solution because we are only sending a mail when we receive a mail that mentions a spam url. The result is that the more spam they send the more mails they receive from us, the less spam they send the less mail they will receive and no innocent addresses are affected.
There is a drawback to SURBL and that is that someone could end up black listed wrongly. This mechanism would add insult to injury but lets face it if I wanted to get at xyz.com I'd send out a bunch of spam as if it came from jdoe@xyz.com advertising xyz.com and wait for the them to appear on the black list and then send out more spam and now watch their ISP get really upset with them as the bounced messages end up with them.
Nick