zombie anti-spammers? fabulous

[rone]

Dear dr_strych9: please supplement my arguments against real-time blackhole lists with this delightful story about a blackhole list that came back to life fifteen months after its death and caused all its subscribers' incoming mail to bounce.

Comments

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

There's another aspect - RBLs harness the power of the group. Instead of waiting until *I* get spam from a site, if anyone if the group gets spam then the RBL protects the rest of the group from *future* spam. Instead of it always being a response to a problem, you can prevent the problem. So instead of everyone having to individually experience the pain before applying the cure, some small number get the pain, then an immunization is developed, and the rest are spared. That's the same system that makes Gmail's spam filtering so good - it only takes some subset of users to report something as spam for their system to learn and protect everyone.

As I've said, RBLs are part of a system. With SpamAssassin you can use them as a weight, and not necessarily a real black hole. With the commercial system we use at work it isn't as flexible as SA, but it is one of many filters the mail goes through and one of the first is a learning whitelist. When we first installed it we had to do some training, and I fed it a lot of old mail to help it learn (good and bad), but after a couple of months it settled down and has been running well for a couple of years.

I'd rather my friends warn me of a scam before I get burned, than have to be scammed to learn the lesson myself. And I'd rather have the power of a large group working for me than be on my own.