On Monday, August 30, 2004, 1:24:27 AM, Bill Landry wrote:
From: "Jeff Chan" jeffc@surbl.org
Why should anyone be required to give any proof?
Sometimes the topic of whitelisting is controversial, so it's good to share research so we can understand the reasons for whitelisting. For example if you had already done this research and shared it, then less time would be wasted on duplicated efforts.
If you want specific data to prove a false positive, then put together a template and post it on the SURBL web site for all to follow.
That's a good suggestion, but I don't think there are any standard tests for legitimacy. If there were, then we could probably automated them and save a lot of trouble. Every case can be different so it's more open ended what one might provide as proof. The borderline spammers are even more difficult to prove or disprove.
But there needs to be some kind of proof provided that we can look at and decide if it's reasonable.
There still needs to be some human judgement and the types of proof can be different.
One obvious thing is to look at domain registration dates. In this case omessage.com was a 2003 registration so that doesn't help much. However the apparent parent domain omeda.com was registered in 1996, which tells us at least a little about the organization.
Another problem is that if you lay down purely objective tests of legitimacy, some spammer can probably engineer their domain to meet those requirements then claim their domain should be whitelisted. We would want to watch out for things like that and retain the ability to exercise some final human judgement.
Jeff C.