On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Michael G. Schabert wrote:

> >Some of the early, now-defunct, DNSBL's were abused in the same
> >fashion as Usenet cancels, and gave the whole DNSBL thing a black eye.
> >All the lists recommended on openrbl.org today have clear and open
> >removal guidelines, and a clear and definite policy on who gets on it
> >in the first place.
>
> I must ask where on the site are "recommended" lists, because the
> main list that I looked at still contained some evil witch hunters
> (heck the second or third entry was spews, one of the least-regulated
> "burn 'em all" vigilantes).

I believe they simply list all the DNSBL's they know, although perhaps
they're a little more selective lately. The "description" is neutral
on most of them (SPEWS included), linking only to the home page and
letting you decide for yourself, but occasionally they'll say "highly
recommended" or "not recommended". For example, they say this about
ORDB: "lists singlestage relays only, active maintained, low risk,
recommended"; SORBS: "...active maintained. Recommended", but on
SPAMBAG: "lists some big isp's with spam-support if they don't take
action on detailed complaints, might be risky". There was one that
used to say, "Lists huge chunks of the Internet, don't use for DNSBL",
but I can't find that one today.

The measure of the lists is whether your friends aren't on it, but
your spammers aren't, so the way to approach it, IMHO, is to enter the
host names of your correspondents and spammers and see which ones work
for you, and have policies you find tolerable. I don't use SPEWS, for
example, because I haven't gotten any UCE that would be blocked by
them, that wasn't already blocked by one of the DNSBL's I do use.

Frederick