[SURBL-Discuss] Re: Leaving SURBL

[Patrik Nilsson]

At 20:51 2005-04-06 -0700, Jeff Chan wrote:
>One of the reasons SURBLs have been very useful to many people
>is because of these policies.  So we're probably not going to
>change them.  That said, there's probably room for other lists
>for folks who want to be more aggressive about mail filtering,
>but we're probably never going to do that with SURBLs.

It's not just about lists for folks who want to be more aggressive about 
spam filtering, it's also about people who want to use surbl-type lists to 
*score*, rather than block, spam.

I am not sure when it happened, but SURBLs are apparently now explicitly 
expected to be used for *blocking* email.

Separate lists primarily used for scoring could be more aggressive in their 
listing policies, without necessarily ending up blocking more FPs.

The current policy for SURBLs, currently being the only major public uri 
list, encourages binary "block or not" implementations that expect surbl 
type lists to be used in that capacity. That's bad, as it unnecessarily 
limits the potential for url checking.

Having alternative lists with other policies could hopefully make 
implementors think twice about how they implement url checking against 
surbl type lists.

And no, this is not a problem caused by SURBL - I can understand why the 
policy is like it is considering what it apparently wants to do - but I 
really believe we should encourage other surbl type lists to avoid limiting 
the use of url checking in anti-spam software.

Patrik