Paul Schwarz wrote:

Hi Guys, just wondered if using SURBL will block IT Dept, HR Dept and such newsletters that people get. We get a lot of those in our depts.

My users, lots of IT depts, haven't missed one due to SURBL. Mostly those newsletters are formated in a trashy way that Bayes or SA's rules can often be more of a problem than SURBL will ever be.

Also what are the chances of blocking a confirmation emails for something someone orders, etc And also Airlines

None of these ever seen in SURBL - again, the ugly formatting is more of a problem.

Dealing with a multinational, multlingual user base I'm often surprised how well SURBL is doing.

Just feeling a little leery of using SURBL for a risk of false positives. Seems like a lot of newsletters outsource to companies that could look like spammers.

I know it won't block and person to person email but can you help me feel more comfortable about SURBL ?

a method is to never block anything - start off with low level SURBL scores , review acording to scores, adapt SURBL scores to your needs and after a while, sit back and enjoy.

and IF there is SURBL FP, then the URL is gone in a couple of hours (if reported correctly)

The reporting policy is so strict that Jeff makes the reporter's life very miserable if he's caught. :-)

Alex

On Thursday, December 2, 2004, 7:11:53 AM, Paul Schwarz wrote:

Hi Guys, just wondered if using SURBL will block IT Dept, HR Dept and such newsletters that people get. We get a lot of those in our depts.

Also what are the chances of blocking a confirmation emails for something someone orders, etc And also Airlines

Just feeling a little leery of using SURBL for a risk of false positives. Seems like a lot of newsletters outsource to companies that could look like spammers.

We have whitelisted major legitimate companies we could find lists of, such as publically traded companies, Alexa's 500 most visited web sites and many others. Generally speaking legitimate companies and newsletters should not be appearing on SURBLs.

If you spot any false positives you can report them to whitelist @surbl.org and we will research and remove them as appropriate.

Here is an inclusion policy which applies to our manual lists like WS and mostly to our automated lists:

http://www.surbl.org/policy.html

The reason newsletters are problematic is that many of them seem to have open, unconfirmed subscription policies, which some people are maliciously adding third parties to. Really this is a problem with the newsletter subscription policies. Some people consider these false subscriptions to be spam. But we don't want to list otherwise legitimate domain names so they should stay off SURBLs.

Our inclusion policies above ask our data sources not to add those to SURBLs, but they do sometimes get added, for example on lists that use spam traps such as JP and OB.

In a nutshell our false positive rate is very low. Our policies help that, and you can help by reporting any false positives you may find to us. Our rate of false positive reports is very low, probably less than one per day.

Jeff C. -- "If it appears in hams, then don't list it."