[SURBL-Discuss] namesdatabase . com

Patrik Nilsson patrik at patrik.com
Sun Oct 3 23:37:45 CEST 2004


At 14:16 2004-10-03 -0700, Jeff Chan wrote:
>On Sunday, October 3, 2004, 8:41:21 AM, Frank Ellermann wrote:
> > Jeff Chan wrote:
> >> We know the guy behind the site is a piece of brown
> >> something.
>
> >> The question is whether it has legitimate uses.  I personally
> >> think these sites are mostly abusive scams, but I'd like to
> >> know if they have legitimate uses.
>
> > Please drop the idea that a site is either white or black.  If
> > it's an abusive scam, then nobody wants it in his inbox.
>
>As the saying goes: if we wanted to block all spam we could list
>* .

And if we wanted to eliminate all FPs, we could whitelist * .

>At this point we have some good spam sources and we need to
>find ways to eliminate false positives.
>
>The best way to do that is to look for domains or IP addresses
>that one might expect to find in hams, and make sure those are
>not in the lists.  Therefore we try to find records that may
>have legitimate uses and take them off the lists as errors.
>
>We are not trying to "find every spammer."  If we were, we could
>just list everything we ever find, but then we would have lists
>that were largely unusable.
>
>I think it's important to share some goals if we are to have
>meaningful and useful results.

We did, until obvious spammers started getting whitelisted.

At 05:09 2004-10-02 -0700, Jeff Chan wrote:
>On Saturday, October 2, 2004, 4:34:34 AM, Patrik Nilsson wrote:
> > 
> <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2b379589.0406081103.7c29a65e%40posting.google.com>
> > 
> <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2b379589.0406070444.4f892be7%40posting.googl>
>
>That's interesting, but that's not the question.  We know the guy
>behind the site is a piece of brown something.
>
>The question is whether it has legitimate uses.  I personally
>think these sites are mostly abusive scams, but I'd like to know
>if they have legitimate uses.

And I think each and every hit on namesdatabase.com in google groups, not 
just nanas hits, show that you have to stretch your definition of 
legitimate use beyond reason for it to include namesdatabase.com.

People being tricked into partaking in scams do not qualify as legit use, 
even if they don't realize that they are contributing to a scam.

At 06:58 2004-10-02 -0700, Jeff Chan wrote:
>Like sendafriend, this site is subject to abuse with an open
>subscription page, and probably has borderline spammers
>harvesting and marketing behind it, but since it can get
>mentioned in hams, I am whitelisting sacredpages.com .

Ok, so now it should be "If it *can* appear in hams, then don't list it.", 
Not "If it *does" appear..."?

patrik



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