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DNS Blacklists - Ain't What They Used to Be...
SpamButcher currently ships with its DNS Blacklist support turned off by default. This is to help simplify configuration. In the past there was also an issue with an "impolitely" shutdown blacklist which caused some problems.
The product would without question catch a little more spam email if it was enabled by default. Periodically a full review on filter performance is conducted. As part of the last one I wanted to find out how much advantage blacklists offer.
The result was that blacklists wouldn't have caught much of the spam that made it through the filters. In fact - a random sample of about a dozen messages didn't find a single spam message that one of the more popular blacklists would've caught.
Why the decrease in effectiveness?
Most responsible ISP's have a reasonable anti-spam policy. Those that don't are included on blacklists so their email can be blocked. Recently spammers have taken to using hacked computers to send their junk emails can be filtered. These hacked computers are sometimes referred to as "zombies."
Since the hacked systems can reside on pretty much any network, it's harder for spam stoppers to block them based on their location on the internet. Spammers are keenly aware of this. They know that email messages sent from zombie systems are both difficult to intercept, and hard to track back to the sender.
Interestingly, there's at least one major ISP that runs a "private' blacklist which appears to be extremely effective. Unfortunately, it doesn't publish its data for use by others. My suspicion is that by performing real-time analysis on incoming spam, they can locate individual offending systems. This would let them detect and block e-mail from specific zombie systems.