At the 2006 International Anti-Spam Summit held today in Beijing and hosted by the Anti-Spam Committee of the Internet Society of China, Spamhaus unveiled the Policy Block List, a new service for Internet Service Providers in China and around the world.
Participants at the conference included Ringo Lam, Council Member of the Internet Professional Association in Hong Kong; Craig Spiezle, Director of Microsoft's Windows Live Strategy; Kim Joon, Security Analyst with the Korea Information Security Agency; and Patrick Peterson, VP Technology for Ironport.
Madame Hu Qiheng, Chairman of ISC, hailed the service as a way to forge greater cooperation among Chinese ISPs, Spamhaus, and large global emailers.
The Spamhaus PBL is a DNSBL database of end-user IP address ranges which should not be delivering unauthenticated SMTP email to any Internet mail server except those provided for specifically by an ISP for that customer's use. The PBL helps networks enforce their Acceptable Use Policy for dynamic and non-MTA customer IP ranges.
Importantly, PBL IP address ranges are added and maintained by each network participating in the PBL project, working in conjunction with the Spamhaus PBL team, to help apply their outbound email policies. Additional IP address ranges may be added and maintained by the Spamhaus PBL Team, particularly for networks which are not participating themselves, and where spam, rDNS and server patterns are consistent with end-user IP space which typically contain high concentrations of "botnet zombies", a major source of spam.
A list of participating networks will be available soon on the Spamhaus website.
"Spamhaus encourages all dialup, DSL and cable modem providers to participate and submit their own PBL ranges," said Danny Levinson, a representative for Spamhaus speaking at the conference. "We will of course also provide an IP Address self-service removal mechanism, and a feature of the PBL is the elimination of 'false positives' with a server-identifying and automatic removal mechanism for single IP addresses."
Spamhaus is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to track the Internet's spam gangs, to provide dependable real-time anti-spam protection for Internet networks, to work with law enforcement agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation. Founded in 1998, Spamhaus is based in the UK and is run by a dedicated team of 25 investigators located on four continents.