[SURBL-Discuss] whitelist senderbase top domains?

[Jeff Chan]

On Wednesday, September 8, 2004, 12:44:34 AM, Bill Landry wrote:
> Quick question:  If I have set "spamcop_uri_limit 25" in my spamcop_uri.cf
> file, and a spammer sends a message containing 30 URIs, all legit except
> one, and 10 of the legit URIs are whitelisted by SURBL, would all of the
> remaining URIs get checked, or still only a random selection of the entire
> 30 URIs found in the message?

25 would get checked randomly from the 30 IIRC.  5 would be not
checked.

> Just wondering if the whitelisting will help
> us to be more accurate in tagging the spammer URI in the message, thus
> cutting down the possibility of the spammer URI not being one of the random
> 25 selected for checking against the SURBLs.

> I'm curious to know what effect the SURBL whitelisting has as it applies to
> both SA 2.6x with the SpamCopURI plug-in and SA 3.0 with the URIDNSBL
> plug-in and the random URI check limit threshold.

> Bill

The SURBL whitelist is an internal exclusion list which currently
has no direct effect on SpamAssassin.  All it does now is to make
sure that these domains do not get added to any SURBLs.

Instead of publishing the whitelist for example as a "do not
check" RBL, we may ask that SpamCopURI and urirhsbl and urhrhssub
take a hard-coded list of the top N most queried legitimate
domains and never query on them.  But that doesn't happen yet.

Theo,
Should I open an RFE about this for URIDNSBL?

Bill,
If you'd like, you can have a similar effect right now by
adding the top N domains from:

  http://www.surbl.org/dns-queries.whitelist.counts.txt

to the SpamCopURI manual whitelist in the conf file.  You'd want
to include both basedomain.com and *.basedomain.com .  In fact
this should be a good improvement for everyone using SpamCopURI
to add.

Eric Kolve may be able to provide more details, or someone
could just try it.  :-)

Jeff C.