[Spamprobe-users] WPBL: an update

[Jem <li...@pc...>]

Many of you expressed interest in my project to collectively use the 
results from multiple spamprobe users for distributed detection of spam 
sources [ http://wpbl.pc9.org/ ] I thought I'd send a brief update, because 
I'm sure most people wanted to sit back and watch what happened first.

The number of members contributing data has grown from 2 to 10, so our 
database has grown substantially too. I am using scripts and ploticus to 
provide some stats here: [ http://wpbl.pc9.org/stats.html ]

I had been in contact with the maintainer of dnsbl.net.au (used to be
Reynolds BL) for a couple weeks now. He has been following our progress
and has been evaluating the WPBL performance on mail test setups designed
to detect false positives. dnsbl.net.au provides one of the largest
DNS-based blocklist (DNSBL) services in the world, used by several
thousand servers and affecting possibly millions of users (an estimate).

First, he has been nice enough to donate rsync access for our use so 
there's no a way for every member to grab an up-to-date copy of the list 
for themselves. More importantly, after evaluating the quality of our data, 
he has added WPBL to his list of "Data Sources Imported from External 
Sources suitable for outright rejection" [ http://dnsbl.net.au/status.php ]

The public can query wpbl.dnsbl.net.au to see if an IP address should be
blocked. And our blocklist has become part of his T1 list, which is his
main list of IPs that can be safely blocked. It's very nice of him to host
our list off his servers and trust me when I say that this is a very
strong endorsement of the quality of our data. If you look at the above
status page, there is only a handful of external lists like ours that are
relied upon for 'T1' inclusion.

So, as it turns out, our data is very useful! Note that I do not recommend 
blocking mail based solely on WPBL and I do not run wpbl.dnsbl.net.au ; 
this is run by 'Reynolds Technology Pty Ltd' and they are publishing data 
that we (WPBL) are placing in the public domain without any warranty. We 
just report exactly what our spam filters see, scientific and objective.