A sincere request for help

[William Stearns <ws...@pobox.com>]

Good afternoon, all,
	Through the tremendous efforts of so many contributors, the 
ws.surbl.org and its equivalent sa-blacklist have crossed 26,000 
live (after the disabled and expired domains have been removed) domains.  
My _sincere_ thanks to everyone that has worked so hard to make this 
project work.

	There have been occasional questions about why the surbl's aren't 
scored higher.  The answer is simple, and is based upon the one universal 
truth in spam characterization: "_Every_ technique used to identify spam 
_can screw up_."  It's my sincere hope that the surbls, and my pet 
ws.surbl.org in particular, screw up less than most, but it's still true 
that they can cause false positives.

	I'm asking everyone that uses any surbls (that includes anyone
using the sa-blacklist.cf, sa-blacklist.uri.cf, ws.surbl.org, *.surbl.org,
spamassasin 3.0, and spamassassin 2.x with spamcopuri) for help.  If you
get any legitimate messages where one of the above mistakenly tagged the
message as spam, _please_ let me know.  I would sincerely appreciate it if
you'd send the message to me as an attachment (forwards or bounces are OK
too) with "blacklist" somewhere in the subject (this skips around my spam
filters; I don't want the autowhitelist to start tagging _you_ as a 
spammer!).
	I'm asking for your help because false positives hurt all of us.  
I'd much rather have a blacklist with 3 domains I'm absolutely certain of 
than a blacklist with 120,000 iffy domains.
	Cheers,
	- Bill

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        "Maybe is an Ambivalent Yet Beguiling Enigma"
(Courtesy of Dale Harris <ro...@maybe.org>)
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William Stearns (wstearns@pobox.com).  Mason, Buildkernel, freedups, p0f,
rsync-backup, ssh-keyinstall, dns-check, more at:   http://www.stearns.org
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Re: [SURBL-Discuss] A sincere request for help

[Jeff Chan <je...@surbl.org>]

On Wednesday, July 14, 2004, 10:06:17 AM, William Stearns wrote:
>         I'm asking everyone that uses any surbls (that includes anyone
> using the sa-blacklist.cf, sa-blacklist.uri.cf, ws.surbl.org, *.surbl.org,
> spamassasin 3.0, and spamassassin 2.x with spamcopuri) for help.  If you
> get any legitimate messages where one of the above mistakenly tagged the
> message as spam, _please_ let me know.  I would sincerely appreciate it if
> you'd send the message to me as an attachment (forwards or bounces are OK
> too) with "blacklist" somewhere in the subject (this skips around my spam
> filters; I don't want the autowhitelist to start tagging _you_ as a 
> spammer!).
>         I'm asking for your help because false positives hurt all of us.  
> I'd much rather have a blacklist with 3 domains I'm absolutely certain of 
> than a blacklist with 120,000 iffy domains.

We probably should have a clearinghouse for false positive
reports, since I'd like to get these too so I can whitelist them
globally in SURBLs.

Bill, can you forward me your FP list, or point me to a location
where I can get them in an automated way?

Jeff C.