For the SARE and SURBL folks -
I would love to decrease the delay between when a spammy URL appears in the message stream and when it's submitted to the WS SURBL gods for blacklisting. Here is an idea that may have been discussed before; if so, just ignore it. :)
Currently, the SARE guys have some kind of rotating schedule of who checks the WS submissions, correct?
Wouldn't it be nice if there were some kind of similar volunteer-based rotating schedule that listed who would be responsible for monitoring the raw message stream and submitting unlisted spam domains? This kind of anonymous schedule handled through rulesemporium.com, and if you had some sort of accountability enforcement.
For instance, each submitter could log in with an account, so the validity of their WS SURBL submissions could be tracked by the SARE folks. If they're submitting a bunch of bogus domains or non-spam domains, their account would be disabled.
Each submitter could sign up for a 15-minute slice of time per week (dividing the week into 672 timeslots), and of course more than 1 submitter could take a timeslot, and each submitter could take more than one timeslot.
Each submitter's "record" (domains successfully submitted and blacklisted) would be *anonymously* available to the public through rulesemporium.com, as a form of reputation incentive.
Benefits:
1. The SURBL community would have the confidence that the message stream is being monitored by *someone* at all times.
2. Each individual member of the SURBL community would have a higher incentive to sacrifice some of each's time to submit spammed domains. The higher incentive is the knowledge the the community is (in a sense) depending on them to submit spammed domains within that certain period of time. The additional incentive to report would come from a decent assurance that it is far less likely that someone else is reporting the same domain, and hence it's less likely that any given submission would be a duplicate.
3. WS SURBL's reporting latency would hopefully decrease, because more people would be submitting.
My Motivation: What prompted me to write this was the fact that some of my customers were complaining that lots of spams were slipping through, so I spent about 30 minutes looking at the false negatives, and all of the domains but 1 of the ones I looked at were not yet listed in SURBL. So I submitted 10-15 domains, and thought to myself... I would do this more often and on a regular schedule if only I knew that others were also willing to sacrifice 15-30 minutes out of their week to the same cause......
Thanks for taking the time to read this suggestion.
Matthew Wilson matthew@boomer.com