MAPS RBL+ worth it?

[Julian Field]

I have just processed the stats for our site from the beginning of this
month, so you've got a pretty random 2 weeks worth.

I have separated out the figures for each of the 5 RBL's I use and
SpamAssassin, so the following are the number of messages detected *only*
by the RBL listed:
      82 Infinite-Monkeys
      81 MAPS-RBL+
     101 ORDB
    9351 SpamAssassin
    1001 osirusoft.com
     693 spamcop.net

The total number of spam messages in this time was 20,231. 8922 of these
were detected by more than 1 spam trap.

So there were only 81 messages which were *only* detected by MAPS-RBL+,
whereas over 9000 were detected *only* by SpamAssassin.

So having MAPS-RBL+ only saved us from 81 pieces of spam in the last 2 weeks.

But $150 is very few hours of someone's time, especially spread over an
entire year. At $30 per hour (cost to the university for 1 person), 5 hours
per year is only 49 seconds per day. So $150 really isn't very much money.

I hope that helps you a bit!
Jules.

At 18:41 15/07/2002, you wrote:
>Hello,
>
>   I'm considering purchasing the RBL+ service from mail-abuse.org
>   and I was wondering if people thought it was worth having.  We
>   get the educational discount so it is only ~$150/yr.  I was
>   thinking about getting it in transfer mode, thinking that would
>   save time/resources over the query mode.  Does anyone have experience
>   of comments about the maps service?   Thanks,
>
>       --Tom Combs

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ