[SURBL-Discuss] Re: Pruning dead domains

Jeff Chan jeffc at surbl.org
Sat Jun 26 02:46:50 CEST 2004


On Saturday, June 26, 2004, 12:12:58 AM, Frank Ellermann wrote:
> Jeff Chan wrote:
 
>> 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.

> ACK, and as far as SC is concerned, SC wont't find a report
> address for "dead" domains, and therefore they should drop
> from sc.surbl.org automatically.  I have to admit that I
> never checked how the other SURBL zones really work, do 
> they also have some kind of automatical expiration ?

Yes, the sc entries currently expire after 4 days of no reports,
so they're data-driven.  The ph entries have a lifetime also,
and ab has a time window of 7 days.  However the ob and ws
lists did not have automatic expiration, so they could grow
indefinitely, which is why it's good that Bill is working on
an expiration function based on the domains becoming unregistered.

>> FWIW They're not actually removed; they're suppressed with a
>> whitelist.

> Yes, and that's the bad thing, because it's something you have
> to do manually.  Sooner or later spammers will abuse the delay
> caused by manual whitelists.  Maybe you could use the SC input
> to automatically remove alive-again-domains from the dead list.

FWIW I stopped removing the dead domains from the lists for
other reasons.  I may add the removal back again later.
The number of entries removed was not too great, even for
ob, which is about the same size as ws at about 20k entries.

Jeff C.



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