Whatever your opinion of UCEPROTECT, hold on to your hat, as things are apparently about to change.
This posting to the USENET newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email indicates that Johann Steigenberger is no longer involved with UCEPROTECT. Going forward, Claus v. Wolfhausen has indicated that he is charge of the lists.At first there was some concern that this post wasn’t true, that it was a deception. I’ve spoken to Claus via email, and that, along with other information, leads me to believe that this is in fact true and correct. (I’ve met neither individual in person, so I suppose this could be a giant hoax, but I’ve got no reason to believe so at this time.)
Claus indicates that UCEPROTECT will no longer list for backscatter and sender verification callouts. These two listing criteria were controversial and I am told that they resulted in numerous complaints of false positives relating to UCEPROTECT. These data relating to listings based on these criteria are being repurposed into a new blocking list at www.backscatterer.org.
He went on to say due to his intervention, UCEPROTECT has ceased publishing the controversial “anonymous” APEWS blocklist data, and that he is unsure if UCEPROTECT will again publish the APEWS data in the future. APEWS, an “anonymous” list widely thought to be created as a replacement for the defunct SPEWS, has been regularly criticized by respected anti-spam advocates such as Steve Linford of Spamhaus and Suresh Ramasubramanian of ISP Outblaze. Controversy includes listing policies considered to be broad and inaccurate, and contact/removal policies perceived as cruel to listees (by deflecting all contact away from the blocklist and toward public discussion forums where listees are often subject to abuse from unrelated parties).
I have yet to write and post reviews of UCEPROTECT or APEWS for dnsbl.com. Look for this in the future.