Beware that the more lists you use the longer it takes the server to accept a valid email because it has to go through every BL.
This is not an altogether bad thing. I have noticed that spammers tend to give up at that point far faster than any legitimate mailer should. A half-minute of quiet time for each session should not interfere with any normal MTA handing you mail, but it does cause a sizable fraction of the spammers ( ~15%) to scurry off in disgust. Another good part of that is that SIMS will do all of the lookups despite the spammer going away, so if you get another connection later you are likely to complete the lookups faster (from cache) and so bad effects can be mitigated. the negative caching times on blacklists are all over the map (the ones I use range from 5 minutes to 12 hours) but it is likely that a legitimate MTA that has given up and timed out will retry soon enough that it will get a shorter delay, and spammers basically never retry.
The listing order of the BLs has some importance. You want the most effective at the top to minimize traffic.
Or you want to reverse that ordering to get the delay effect and to get a better sense of just how good each list is. I play games with my ordering to figure out effectiveness...
[...]
To see hardcore anti-spammer at work, hang out in the NANAE newsgroup: news.admin.net-abuse.email. You might learn a thing or two from them.
The folks in nanae are all a bunch of kooks...
Okay, maybe not quite all, but a sizable slice really are nutcases. I have been unable to break the nanae habit, but I have a killfile that keeps me from seeing about half of the traffic unless I dig for it and includes most of the perennial top 10 posters by message count (and in some cases any message referencing their posts.) Then I manually mark about 3/4 of what is left as read based on the subject lines. If you don't have a good newsreader with strong filters, nanae is almost unreadable. I recommend MT-Newswatcher, but I hear that Thoth is pretty good as well.
-- Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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