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Spamcop SCBL return status codes


Telarin

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Ok, here's a suggestion that in my opinion would make the SCBL an order of magnitude more useful.

As it is now, an IP address is either in the SCBL or not in the SCBL, which is fine for the hosts that either send mostly spam, or send mostly not spam. The problem comes in with the majority of hosts in the middle that send some spam, and some legitimate email.

Many blocklists have different return status codes for different types of hosts. For instance 127.0.0.2 might be an open proxy, whereas 127.0.0.4 may be an open relay.

What I suggest is that for hosts listed in the SCBL, the return code vary from say 127.0.0.1 to 127.0.0.5, with 5 being a host that sends mostly spam, and a 1 being a host that sends just enough spam to be listed, or is listed for autoresponders only.

That way, for users like me that have to deal with businesses and customers, and find myself whitelisting many mailservers that are borderline listings, I could set my server to block all the 127.0.0.3, 4, and 5 servers, and only tag the 1 and 2 servers as possible spam. Most mail servers support multiple return codes as it is, so this would greatly extend the functionality to most SCBL users.

It shouldn't take substantially more CPU to assign a spamminess code to a host than it does to simply list them in the SCBL, so I don't think the SCBL would suffer a performance hit or need any new software. Spamcop already keeps track of the spam to real mail ratio, so if it was based off those numbers, and maybe a bit of code on the spamtraps to detect probably misdirected autoresponders, it would require only minimal coding and database space.

Well, thats just my $0.02, would anyone else here find a feature like that useful?

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