Michael, could you paste that to the bug on the bugzilla? your comments
will not make it in there otherwise.

--j.

Michael Peddemors writes:
> On Thursday 01 May 2008 04:03, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> wrote:
> > Steven Champeon has been in touch regarding 'testing my enemieslist rDNS
> > patterns data against the SpamAssassin spam/ham corpus(es) to see if
> > there's a reason for us to collaborate.'
> 
> > I'm curious to see how incorporating EL DNSBL lookups into SpamAssassin
> > might be useful; we have a DNSBL mirror network (currently three hosts,
> > with more on the way) or I can talk about how to use it with a patched
> > rbldnsd if you wanted to do some local testing. It'd be really
> 
> Actually, this is surprising that SA hasn't looked at something like this 
> already.. We also use a similar method in our Mail Server technologies, 
> albeit we do it in the SMTP layer.. but I think this begs a few questions..
> 
> o Should it be RBL based..
> 
> In the past SA users have been stung with RBL based lookups, when RBL's get 
> blocked etc.. leading to very high system loads..
> 
> o Should SA start integrating a definition update program for something like 
> this?
> 
> Compiling even 10k regex patterns takes very little overhead, and by doing 
> daily updates of a locally cached list there is little risk of problems even 
> when the updater fails, the latest regex's will always be on hand.
> 
> o Should this use one regex supplier, or community based?
> 
> This might be more helpful, as since there are projects like Enenies List, 
> our 
> own DynaRegex .. or other companies, projects etc.. that might evolve out of 
> this.
> 
> It also could have several different types of regex patterns, as mentioned 
> below  so that SA users could choose score settings for some patterns 
> differently than others..  Some patterns are safe enough to score very high, 
> while generic shared webhost patterns may want to be scored a little lower.
> 
> I think that the regex pattern database would be an excellent candidate for 
> building out an SA defintion updater..
> 
> > OK, sounds good. I'm really interested in seeing what the various FP
> > rates would be for both the HELO and PTR for the various return values;
> > I'm also interested in seeing what rates are for the different
> > subclasses (as formed by the combination of A response and TXT response
> > for the same lookup, so "static/cable" or "dynamic/dsl" or
> > "natproxy/vpn"). Basically, I'm using these today as very blunt hammers,
> > and I want to make sure I have a good sense of how to better tune the
> > scoring. And you guys have such great stats, so I came to you :)
> >
> > > So, these are generally run against the SMTP connecting host's
> > > rDNS, right?
> >
> > Both PTR and HELO/EHLO string, yes. We've found that PTR is a good
> > indicator, but when the HELO string is a match for some EL pattern it's
> > a very reliable indicator of bot activity with a very low FP rate, so we
> > test both when available. Of course, this differs between the various
> > types, so I wouldn't assume webhost or outmx or static PTR are
> > necessarily bad, just indicative. But we'll see what the numbers
> > look like after we run some tests, I suppose :)
> >
> > > By the way, do you mind if we conduct this conversation on a public
> > > Bugzilla entry?  that's generally how we do it.  Doing that in the
> > > open is also more likely to get useful info on how other hosts
> > > have found the increased load from SpamAssassin lookups, too.
> >
> > No, not at all, though I definitely want to know how adding this to
> > SA would affect our load; and give me time to throw a few more rbldnsd
> > mirrors into the rotation if required. (Running lookups against the
> > patterns is very fast, 75K/s here on my macbook, but once you add
> > logging and DNS overhead it slows down considerably :-/)
> >
> > So, what next? Should we look at setting up a local rbldnsd instance
> > to isolate testing from our production machines? Was the doc I sent
> > a URL for in my last email sufficient to tweak whatever SA rules
> > you need to test? I'm here to answer any questions you have :)
> >
> >
> >
> > Anyway, usage details are here:  http://enemieslist.com/how/use.html --
> > we'd need to add some rules to do this.  I've been meaning to do this for
> > several weeks(!) but things have been busy :( so here's a new ticket.
> 
> -- 
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