On Friday, June 25, 2004, 6:17:27 PM, Frank Ellermann wrote:
Jeff Chan wrote:
I have removed Bill's list of dead domains from all SURBLs. That should reduce all lists in size somewhat.
Are you sure that this is a good idea ? After all SURBL is a way to identify spam, and stupid spammers spamvertize "dead" domains. Or they create 1 domain per spam run and don't care how fast it's "dead". Rogue registrars like DirectI probably have this procedure on auto-pilot, including their "we'll look into this" delay tactics.
I agree with your point that if spammers continue to use dead domains in their spams we could continue to block on them, but I think several factors could influence that:
1. Unusable domains do spammers no good. They probably don't have much incentive to keep including them since they would send people to a site that doesn't work.
2. There will be quite a bit of latency in our removing dead domains. The delay will probably let them expire out of use in spams also.
FWIW They're not actually removed; they're suppressed with a whitelist. So we can easily restore them if needed by taking them off the whitelist.
Pruning these lets us reduce the size of our lists quite a bit which is generally a good thing for practical reasons.
Jeff C.