NJABL blacklist goes offline

After more than ten years service, anti-spam blacklist NJABL ("Not just another bogus list") has stated that it will no longer be providing information on potential sources of spam. The IPv4 addresses it collected were not just from hosts from which NJABL had received spam. The site operators, headed by Jon Lewis, also actively sought out overly lax hosts, such as freely accessible mail servers (open relays) and open proxies.

Services which continue to query NJABL are at present receiving the useless, but properly formed response "not listed" for all IP addresses and are thus merely wasting resources. Once hosting service Atlantic.Net points the DNS entry for the NJABL's blacklist zones to an unallocated space, however, mail servers, depending on how they are configured, may block emails or move them to spam folders. NJABL has not revealed when exactly this will take place – a further reasons for taking prompt action.

Administrators who use SpamAssassin to prevent spam and who regularly update their SpamAssassin filter rules are in the clear – since revision 1451776 account has been taken of NJABL's shut down. Postmasters who configure their own filter rules and query blacklists using their own configurations now need to remove queries to NJABL. Spot checks by The H's associates at iX have found that action is still required in some quarters.

(djwm)