[SURBL-Discuss] RFC: significantly reducing FPs on OB

Joseph Brennan brennan at columbia.edu
Sun Jul 13 04:00:29 CEST 2008



--On Saturday, July 12, 2008 1:41 AM -0700 Jeff Chan <jeffc at surbl.org> 
wrote:

> We can probably significantly reduce the false positives on
> ob.surbl.org, the SURBL list based on Outblaze's URI blacklist:
>
>   http://www.surbl.org/lists.html#ob
>
> at the cost of some possibly minor false negatives.
>
> SpamAssassin has live (weekly?) statistics about the performance
> of their rules, including all SURBL lists, against their ham and
> spam corpora at their Rule QA site:
>
>   http://ruleqa.spamassassin.org/
>
> As you can see OB ranks significantly below the other SURBL
> lists, with much higher FP rates around 0.1% compared to 0.01% to
> 0.025% or so.  (Note that the Rule QA site seems to have occasional
> glitches, so if the numbers seem out of range one week, check
> again later.)
>
> Should we make that change?


This agrees with our experience using SURBL for a few years.  We've
seen the occasional fp with the ob listings, and none I am aware of
with the rest of SURBL.

What's the change?

Joseph Brennan
Lead Email Systems Engineer
Columbia University Information Technology



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