SORBS is way too restrictive

Thursday, May 1. 2008

SORBS is way too restrictive

RBLs enable mail admins to automatically block incoming mail based on DNS lookups. But I noticed that my MTA was again blocking Google and Hotmail completely, again due to the overly restrictive SORBS blacklist. This is inacceptable collateral damage, so I suggest you don’t use SORBS if you intend to receive mail from large-scaled customer sites. SpamAssassin still gives scores for that blacklist, but not enough to trigger a blocking by only that single list.

Posted by Stephan Paukner in Information Technology at 05:30 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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I have quite good results with dnsbl.sorbs.net list.dsbl.org No false positives so far. Any further RBLs you could recommend?

#1 Martin Leyrer (Homepage) on 2008-05-04 22:19 (Reply)

Well, my Postfix log summary (pflogsumm) says that dnsbl.sorbs.net blocked hotmail.com and google.com. I was also using dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net. Anyway, that list wasn’t blocking much at all recently, within 5 days about 60-90 connections. list.dsbl.org even only ~3. Much more hits gain bl.spamcop.net (~1700) and zen.spamhaus.org (~1000), but I can’t promise that these aren’t too restrictive as well. I also use blackholes.mail-abuse.org dialups.mail-abuse.org pbl.spamhaus.org for DUL blocking, but I don’t know whether they trigger at all.

#1.1 Stephan on 2008-05-05 06:22 (Reply)

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