How does SURBL prevent Joe Jobs and other false positives?
The averaging effect of a large SpamCop reporting base seems to be very strong, and very few false positives (FPs) seem to get into sc.surbl.org. The fact that the manual SpamCop reports can be and probably are mostly hand-tuned by every SC user seems to help prevent false positives. I.e., most SC users probably make an effort to uncheck legitimate domains to prevent false reporting. Certainly the existing SURBL whitelist could be used to prevent Joe Jobs (false reporting or detection of legitimate domains). We’ve already added some of the common domains like yahoo, hotmail, ebay and amazon, etc. These seldom appear above the threshold yet, however, so the law of averages and careful reporting seem to be on our side so far. (Note that the above comments apply to the handling of SpamCop URI data that goes into sc.surbl.org. However the gloabl whitelist applies to all SURBLs, including sc. Once a domain or IP address is whitelisted, it’s excluded from all SURBLs.) Update: Our whitelist,
