The new SURBL data engine is ready enough to start testing. The external lists such as WS, JP, OB, AB, PH have essentially the same content as before, but the SC and XS lists are significantly updated.

The new XS list is twice as large at about 1000 records and the inclusion is a lot more selective to get more spammers and far fewer FPs.

The new SC list has about the same 500 or so records based on report counts, but adds nearly 4000 domains based on their IP resolutions into the most spammy networks. That's in addition to my manual blacklist which is also several thousand records now, but the manual blacklist applies to both old and new lists, so it's the bad IP domains that are the main change. By design, they're very spammy; they're pretty much the most spammy of those reported to SpamCop.

I'd like us to start testing these now. We can simply change XS over to the new data at some point, but for SC, we should set up a temporary new domain like sc2.surbl.org so it can be tested independently of sc. The new lists should be significant improvements over the old lists, but naturally we should test the new SC list before putting it into production since sc is currently live. Would anyone with a public nameserver like to carry sc2 for testing? It is a temporary zone and will go away after testing. Please reply off list if you can serve it up.

Perhaps we'll cut over XS when we have SC2 set up so the changes are more or less simultaneous. Might make testing/stats simpler to keep track of that way.

Note: please don't start testing sc2 in a major way until we have several name servers set up. Even then the name servers probably won't handle large production loads, so it should be tested on smaller mail servers, test corpora, etc. We'll mention here when it's ok to start testing.

Comments?

Jeff C. -- Don't harm innocent bystanders.