Spamhaus and SURBL results re-evaluated.
The most recent
VBSpam results
incorrectly stated that
SURBL
failed to detect a blacklisted URL in any of the emails in the
Wombat
feed of phishing emails; the performance of
Spamhaus
on the feed was also affected.
We have since discovered that a technical glitch on our side meant that none of the domains found in the emails in the
Wombat
feed were scanned against the
SURBL
domain-based blacklist, which consequently was reported not to have ‘blocked’ any of the emails in this feed. While it is impossible to get accurate results from checking the domains several weeks after the emails were sent, we have reason to assume that a significant portion of the emails in this feed contained at least one blacklisted domain.
The same glitch affected another participating domain-based blacklist, the
Spamhaus DBL
, whose performance contributes to the
Spamhaus ZEN+DBL
results. Thus, the performance of this solution on the
Wombat
feed was in fact better than the 47% catch rate reported.
The issues did not affect the performance of either blacklist on other feeds in the test, nor did it affect any of the other participating products. We offer our apologies to both
SURBL
and
Spamhaus
.
Posted on 27 November 2012 by
Martijn Grooten
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