On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 01:24:10PM -0700, Mike Bird wrote: > An RBL is not just about software. It's about minimizing > false positives and false negatives, In the past things have been so, yes, I admit that. But I think false positives and false negatives are becoming less important as solutions like Spamassassin's score calculations are becoming the norm. Almost none of the email I block is blocked because of one single reason. Almost always I block email because the recipient is listed on more than one list and the message looks fishy. I think this is the way things will be handled in the future, there will be more different ways to analyze suspiciousness of a message and it's source. Then a single listing only will only cause the other filters to be used more readily. I must say, it would be nice if Exim had a nice sender scoring extension so that I would not have feed almost all spam to my dedicated Spamassassin server. (Hint: I would love it if some Exim-guru were to tell me that I am wrong and there already is such an extension :) Another point about false positives is that many people do actually wan't false positives via escalation. It puts pressure on bad ISP's and may or may not help to get them understand how important fighting spam is. But I personally prefer that escalation would not be used to cause more than inconvenience. Graylisting connected to Spamassassin scores seems to be a nice way to handle this in a way that may cause inconvenience, but does not block email entirely. > A well run RBL lists based on the criteria documented on > the website, not some undocumented test (backscatter) which > the RBL domain itself has failed for years. I agree that this part of the documentation could use some clarification, but I think the current text includes all spam, even that spam which is reflected. I do not think that it includes bounces not including the spam, but I kind of understood that Sorbs is not supposed to list because of them. It is not as if there was some huge misunderstanding about Sorbs listing all ways that spam are delivered to end users. People clearly have different views on this policy.
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