Over the past few months it appears that a few of the DNSBLs that I had been using, decided to go offline. Hundreds of SPAM messages were getting through. Outlook picked up many of them, but it also has a lot of false positives, so I needed to go through each SPAM message to ensure that valid mail wasn't being flagged. This is a major PITA and completely makes the filtering useless. So today, I did a search for some new DNSBLs.
I already had bl.spamcop.net, which picks up quite a few, but when I added zen.spamhaus.org (the top rated list), the SPAM STOPPED! It was like night and day and I'm very happy thus far. We'll see how well it works over the next few days. I also added lists for Brazil (BR), China (CN), and Russia (RU) from countries.nerd.dk and country.georbl.info as they are the top 3 SPAM countries that I receive SPAM from.
My mail server logs which DNSBL the incoming connections are listed on, so I'll be monitoring them. So far, zen.spamhaus.org hasn't let anything pass that the country lists would pickup, so I'm a happy happy camper. If you've been seeing an increase in SPAM lately, you might want to check these out.
In my spare time I have been working on a new web site that I was hoping to have ready 4 weeks ago. With everything that has been going on, and some bugs that I have discovered in Visual Studio, the project is taking longer that expected. A friend of mine (Vertigo) has been eagerly awaiting the site, so I thought I'd let him and everyone else know that I'm working on it. If the site is successful, it will need to support at least 100,000 users/hour, which is why I'm making sure that everything is designed correctly and I have been talking with some site hosts. When it's ready, I'll post more about the site and it's mission statement.