back to article Spamhaus debuts whitelist service

Anti-spam researchers at the Spamhaus Project have introduced a whitelist of known benign internet mail servers. The approach sits alongside Spamhaus' well-established blacklist of bad mail servers to make it easier for mail server operators to filter junk from incoming email traffic. Qualified corporations such as banks, law …

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  1. Jacqui

    whitelist ends up as a greylist

    there was a discussion regarding WL's on spam-l and a few people admitted using commercial WL's as a "greylist". Basically it is assumed that people only (pay to) join a WL to get thier commercial message out. So instead of letting such trash through you let S::A add a NEGATIVE score if thier ip is on a commercial whitelist.

    Given the recent messagelabs originated volume UBE and my spamtrap reporting fiasco

    where ML was asked by the client if I would gve them the domains of my spamtraps :-)

    http://caren.ddns.me.uk/spam/messagelabs-spam1.txt

    IMHO addition of ML or any other "commercial/TBTB" will prove to me that the WL is tainted.

    1. Andrew Gordon
      Go

      Sounds OK

      If you read the description of the whitelist, ISPs and other operations that provide mail service to others are not elligible - only people operating their own servers for non-spam purposes. So MessageLabs etc are excluded.

      Remains to be seen how well they manage to police it, but at least it claims to be doing the right thing...

  2. Stuart Halliday
    Thumb Down

    Nice....and about time

    I wonder if hotmail and yahoo will ever be on it this century?

    Nah, can't see it.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    So Spamhaus is getting into the spam business

    "Qualified corporations such as banks, law firms, airlines, medical centers and government agencies, and transactional email from automated billing systems, ecommerce servers, online banking and booking systems are all candidates for the whitelist."

    Yea. Just the people who presently ignore my account settings to not send me any spam. For example, everyone in the US who's mortgage is with or serviced by Bank of America, which is the majority of mortgages, gets a monthly mortgage payment spam even when every setting on their account is set to never send spam of any kind.

    I've always found Spamhaus to be pretty shady in my dealings with them over their BL. This just confirms why my decision to not use their services is a good decision.

  4. Jacqui

    need money?

    Spamhaus hit my shady radar when they suddenly needed money to fight the US case. It was odd that at that exact time, lots of unis and small businesses were blocked from the free SH services and told they had to pay up.

    Of course, non of them we told to pay up until well after they noticed all of thier mail was being bounced. I know one MSP and one uni that ended up bouncng thier own internal email :-)

    I do hope the whitelist project works but I will not hold my breath.

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