Status of bl.csma.biz: ALIVE

McFadden Associates has been publishing two different, spamtrap-driven DNSBL zones since October 2003.

• A primary zone, bl.csma.biz, containing only aggressive hosts that have spammed repeatedly during a short (recent) timeframe.
• An additional zone, sbl.csma.biz, with more aggressive listing criteria. It lists hosts that have generated spam within a 45-day period. They recommend that this one not be used for outright rejections; indicating that it was instead more suitable for use in scoring systems like SpamAssassin.

I personally use these lists in my day job as one of many data points to vet potential clients. In late October, coworkers asked me to look into repeated timeouts in our DNSBL lookup tools. Investigation revealed that the McFadden blacklist name servers and website were no longer reachable on the Internet.

I contacted one of the administrators behind these lists on Saturday, November 3, 2007, who indicated to me that the issue was unintentional; related to problems with a new piece of hardware. The situation has been corrected, and these lists are now again responding to queries.