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Re: [Asrg] 7. Best Practices - DNSBLs - Article

2003-08-14 09:34:31
Jason Steiner wrote:

Why? If that single source is reliable and does a good job of implementing
the policies I choose for my mail servers (eg. "We don't want mail from dialups here.") , what is the point of incurring the extra load of querying more than one, especially if the second is going to be much more resource intensive? (eg. A content filter behind a DNSBL.)

Indeed. Spam filtering is all about systems making informed choices for their own needs. If system A thinks that a randomly generated "block this" choice fits their needs, and system B thinks that 75 different filters have to be unanimous before blocking, who are _we_ to judge which is better? Not our machine. Not our users. None of our business.

Instead, we should be focusing on:

a) making sure that systems _can_ make informed choices by ensuring that filtering methods tell the truth in a simple way of what they do b) making suggestions on operational "properties" (such as consistency to published standards, delisting mechanisms where appropriate) rather than the blocking criteria themselves.

There is a DNSBL that blocks all of IPv4 space. There is another that returns a randomly selected block/non-block indication on every query. Are they bad/non-BCPish? No, because they're perfectly clear and honest about what they do (including a comment about how dumb it would be to actually _use_ them to filter email ;-).


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