Using BGP for realtime import and export of spam whitelist/blacklist entries
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 2014-05-21

a year in the life

by Peter Hessler

The results of using BGP for realtime import and export of spam whitelist/blacklist entries

In early 2013, I introduced a new method to distribute spam whitelist/blacklist entries. Now, I am able to present the results of 1 year of usage.

In the battle against Spam, many mail server admins collect and distribute IP addresses of systems that send them Spam. However, distribution of these lists are traditionally limited to 2 methods.

is periodically downloading this list from a source, usually a web server often causing massive load and slowness at the top of the hour.
is a real-time lookup against an external provider (such as dns-rbls) so your response time is dependent on how fast they respond or timeout.
This talk discusses a 3rd solution: using BGP to distribute the IP addresses in a real-time manner.