Hi SURBLers --
has anyone talked to Jay Allen and the MT-Blacklist people?
MT-Blacklist -- http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/ -- is a blacklist of "bad" URLs (sound familiar? ;). They have quite a small list from the looks of things, but cross-pollination could work both ways; if *they* looked up SURBL, or even just looked up a "blog-spam" SURBL sublist, that'd be a lot more sensible.
BTW I bet the blog spammers and email spammers are the same people. (If blog spammers are the people who *used* to do referrer spamming, then I'm *sure* of it -- see http://taint.org/2003/08/14/040652a.html ).
Also -- some info on that google technique posted here and in SpamAssassin-users recently -- read this: http://kalsey.com/2004/07/new_comment_spam_technique/
"It appears the spammers have a new tactic in increasing their PageRank. They find a site that doesn't delete comment spam and fill it with links. Then they boost the PR of that site by spamming it in blog comments. Once the spam-friendly's site has in increased Google ranking, all those spammed links in their comments will get a boost in rank as well."
I'll bet that's it -- working like so:
1. spammer S sets up payload site 2. S spams comment spam everywhere to up its PageRank 3. S email-spams with the google search URL 4. top hit for that phrase is the payload site.
--j.