public blacklists

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 19:15, Paul Howarth wrote:
> Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> > On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 02:54, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> >>The SURBL option examines the URLs in the spam messages and checks
> >>various block lists.  If they show up on the block list the score is
> >>increased appropriately.  
> > 
> > I was just asking that question. Thanks for clearing that up. So,
> > effectively, it's just another form of greylisting then.
> 
> No, greylisting is a completely different thing. Greylisting ensures that the 
> sending server is a proper MTA that retries when it sees a temporary failure 
> during a delivery attempt. Most spamware does not do this, hence greylisting 
> stops lots of spam. SURBL is looking at the message body after delivery and 
> scoring it as likely to be spam or not based on the URLs found there. Two 
> completely different things.

In that case, in some cases, eg: if one runs their own mail-server,
grey-listing seems to be a better option compared to spamassassin, even
when using SURBL.

Reason being, greylisting stops it at the MTA level, spamassassin only
tracks it once it's already in the system.

--
Ow Mun Heng
Gentoo/Linux on D600 1.4Ghz 
Neuromancer 22:05:15 up 31 min, 4 average: 0.26, 0.60, 0.88