[SURBL-Discuss] Whitelist Please

[Steven Champeon]

on Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 01:31:25PM -0700, Jeff Chan wrote:
> The reason for whitelisting all of them is that they all belong
> to euniverse.  While I agree that these "spam to your friends
> with jokes, greetings, prayers, whatever" sites are stupid and
> highly abuse-prone, they do have some legitimate uses and should
> probably not be blocked globally.

Let's all try not to lose sight of the fact that SURBL is not a "block
all spam" service. It is a list of domains known never to appear in any
legitimate mail. If flowgo/euniverse/killer26374medzpilz.bix/whoever is
a spamhaus with fixed IP space, we'll block them anyway, with a broad
mix of antispam tools. If they're spamming through zombies, SURBL may be
useful to help stop them or not. But let's not make SURBL into a
"version two" antispam system, trying to solve every problem, or we'll
spend even more time arguing here. I like SURBL because it covers the
last 2% of the spam that my filters don't catch, but lets me quarantine
it so I can figure out why my other filters didn't catch it. I'd never
use SURBL for rejecting mail, that'd be a potential source of
backscatter for innocent victims of joe jobs given my setup here, and
probably given the setups of many other folks here.

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