Steve Atkins wrote:
On Apr 3, 2008, at 5:40 AM, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 09:27:32PM -0700, David Cawley wrote:
Personally, I like the idea of defining DNSBL as DNS Based List as
it simply implies list data served up via DNS and it's generic enough
to encompass the various flavors - RHSBL's, URIBL's etc.
I concur with this, and suggest that perhaps using it would avoid the
necessity of getting into the alphabet soup of all the other terms.
Given that the whole point of using "DNSBL" is that it's a known and
recognised acronym, redefining it to mean something entirely different
seems to miss that point?
It's never been effectively formalized as meaning that. I must confess
I've always treated it as the generic "based" myself.
Similarly the term "spam" - spam was originally recognized as meaning
_only_ the same article posted to many Usenet groups. It didn't include
the same article cross-posted to many groups (the term was "Jello" I
think), nor articles doing both ("velveeta"). We were so food-oriented
back then ;-)
If I had listened to this argument and I hadn't "broken" the "known and
recognized" meaning of "spam" in the first section in
http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/faqs/spam.html written by me in 1994,
we'd be calling email spam "marmite" or something equally repulsive ;-)
I've got the following wording in the document now:
Due to the rising amount of spam and other forms of network abuse on
the Internet, many community members and companies began to create,
maintain and publish DNS-based reputation systems (DNS-Based Lists)
of IP addresses or domains and make reputation suggestions or
assertions about email sourced from these IP addresses or domains.
The first DNS-based Lists were almost exclusively intended to be used
(by email administrators) as lists of abusive IP addresses to block,
however the DNS publication method has proven to be so robust,
popular and simple to use, that it has been extended for use in many
different ways, far beyond the designers' of DNS or DNS-based
blocking IP lists imaginings. For example, today, the same basic
DNS-based listing technology is commonly used for:
DNSWL listings of well-behaving email source IP addresses
(whitelist).
RHSBL listings of well/ill behaving email source domains (often
applied against the domain part of the originating email address
or DNS PTR (reverse IP) lookups)
URIBL listings of well/ill behaving web link domains or host names
used in email
Further, the DNSBL user using the list doesn't have to use a listing
as a pass/fail binary decision, it can use a listing as one factor in
email filters that make decisions based on scoring multiple factors
together.
The DNS-based list technology has even been extended to purely
informational purposes. For example, implementations that return
results based on what geographic region an IP is putatively allocated
in, implementations that translate an IP address into a ASN number
and/or allocation block, implementations that indicate whether the
queried domain is registered through a given Domain registrar,
implementations that return aggregate numeric reputation for an IP or
domain from another system's email system, and so on. The
possibilities are virtually endless.
As well, DNS-based listing technology has also been used in areas
other than email filtering, such as IRC, web access control, and
transaction verification.
As the terminology in this area has never been well formalized, often
overlaps, and lacks precision, this document has been written to use
the term "DNSBL" to refer to DNS-based lists generally, not just DNS-
based block (or black) lists. This document is not applicable to
some DNSBLs in some areas, these areas will be mentioned as
appropriate, but it is the author's belief that most of the practises
are applicable to almost all DNSBLs.
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