At 20:51 2005-04-06 -0700, Jeff Chan wrote:
One of the reasons SURBLs have been very useful to many people is because of these policies. So we're probably not going to change them. That said, there's probably room for other lists for folks who want to be more aggressive about mail filtering, but we're probably never going to do that with SURBLs.
It's not just about lists for folks who want to be more aggressive about spam filtering, it's also about people who want to use surbl-type lists to *score*, rather than block, spam.
I am not sure when it happened, but SURBLs are apparently now explicitly expected to be used for *blocking* email.
Separate lists primarily used for scoring could be more aggressive in their listing policies, without necessarily ending up blocking more FPs.
The current policy for SURBLs, currently being the only major public uri list, encourages binary "block or not" implementations that expect surbl type lists to be used in that capacity. That's bad, as it unnecessarily limits the potential for url checking.
Having alternative lists with other policies could hopefully make implementors think twice about how they implement url checking against surbl type lists.
And no, this is not a problem caused by SURBL - I can understand why the policy is like it is considering what it apparently wants to do - but I really believe we should encourage other surbl type lists to avoid limiting the use of url checking in anti-spam software.
Patrik