[SURBL-Discuss] What to tell senders

[Joseph Brennan]

Jeff Chan <jeffc at surbl.org> wrote:

> Thanks sm and Rob.  I agree with sm that it would probably
> be better if end users did not contact us directly.  Mail
> administrators and abuse desk folks should have a much better
> chance of understanding what's going on, so we would prefer
> to hear from them in the event of a false positive.   As Rob
> mentions, FPs tend to be quite rare since we're trying to
> blacklist only hard-core spammers on SURBLs.



OK, that's what I will do.  They will see our generic spam message
and contact our helpdesk, and I will be able to tell from the system
log what the problem was.  The log will record the URI and that it
matched a SURBL record.  I'm glad I asked.

Regarding rejection, I realize I just popped up on this list without
intro.  Columbia University's mail system refuses about 1 million
messages a day based on Spamhaus, NJABL, DNSBL, high Spamassassin
score, and rules written in Mimedefang.  SURBL looks like a good
addition to our arsenal.

Logging in test yesterday and overnight suggests that SURBL will
catch 50,000 messages a day that are not already caught before
Spamassassin (which we run last).  That's very worthwhile.  Great!

Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology