[SURBL-Discuss] SC manual blacklist pruned

Jeff Chan jeffc at surbl.org
Thu Nov 18 04:09:24 CET 2004


We have a manual blacklist for the SC list that I use to nudge
records without enough hits onto SC (sooner than they otherwise
would):

  http://spamcheck.freeapp.net/blacklist-domains

I've pruned that list, removing domain names that have had no
NS records for three successive checks over about five weeks.
That has reduced the manual blacklist list by about 270 records.
Before removing those I checked to see how many DNS hits they
were getting and only notinuse.biz had any of significance, so
we kept that one on the manual blacklist.

SC will probably be manually pruned again some time in future,
but the list (both automatic and manual) is so small and
effective to begin with that it tends not to need to much manual
maintenance. 

Note that cleaning up the manual blacklist is not the same
as whitelisting.  Any record that comes off the manual blacklist
can be manually or automatically blacklisted again in future at
any time if it appears in spams again.  So it's not at all a
"free pass" to spammers or anything like that.  It just means
some domains that are unusable and don't appear in any recent
spams are no longer included on SC for now.  If they get used
again, they'll get listed again.

I still plan to re-write the SC-specific engine and the general
data engine used for processing the SURBL data.  The main
features will be more uniform processing of the data, including
public logs of additions, deletions, whitelists, etc.  Aside from
SC, the results should be identical, and I will run them in
parallel for a while to make sure that's the case.  The SC
data will be handle more efficiently and probably have an
resolved-IP-based biasing system to get the domains of
persistent spammers onto SC sooner, automatically.

Cheers,

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



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