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Re: Greylisting for @debian.org email, please



On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, Jesus Climent wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 08:46:33PM -0700, Blars Blarson wrote:
>
> > I recomed using spamhaus SBL-XBL, or at least CBL (which is included in
> > SBL-XBL).
> 
> I dont: http://www.paulgraham.com/spamhausblacklist.html

Selected paragraph from the article:

   This case illustrates an important failing of blacklists. Unlike
   filters, they're run by humans. And humans are all too likely to abuse
   the kind of power that blacklists embody. Perhaps someone will start
   another blacklist that tries to avoid such abuses. But how long before
   that one becomes corrupt too?

This is pure FUD against DNSBLs (which is their proper name). The truth
is that some DNSBLs are run by humans, but not all of them are.

The CBL, in particular, is completely automated, it tries very hard
to not list "real" mail servers, and you can remove yourself trivially.

In fact, most of the effectiveness of SBL-XBL really comes from the CBL,
as shown by the widely known statistics:

http://www.sdsc.edu/~jeff/spam/Blacklists_Compared.html

We could use just the CBL, and we would already reduce spam by a half
without a lot of controversy. I will be more than happy to apply my
other filters (razor, pyzor, bogofilter) to the *remaining* email, but
at least I would know that we are doing *something* about it at the
SMTP level, which is where we can really avoid spam to reach our inboxes.



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