Filters or Blacklist?

[allangjohnson]

Which is fastest and most efficient - to list known bad domains in a regex filter or to put them in the blacklist?

Thanks.

AJ

[QuietOne]

I think it’s pretty much personal preference.

[Sidewinder]

I have followed Stan's lead and used his I hate everyone Blacklist which had all domains as wildcards in the list and to use it you just go in and delete the ones that you get mail from. Doing and import seemed much simpler than the filter approach. I think that the internals of MWP convert the BL to regex anyway so don't think there should be any real performance issues.

[stan_qaz]

I've been scratching my head over this one too, as to speed the only difference since both are regex is going to be how efficiently the regex is written, either by the user or by the blacklist converter and how efficient MW is at scanning the headers for the two different sources of the regex. I would think the differences either way would be small, but I'd bet on the blacklist being faster. I've fooled with the blacklist speed and see minimal differences in processing 500 messages with it populated or empty.

I went with the blacklist for my "I hate everyone" list since it was easy to add and easy to maintain. Also at some point we are going to get more tools that work with the blacklist for maintenance and hopefully statistics which will be another point in favor of the blacklist.

[allangjohnson]

Thanks. Sounds like the Blacklist is the way to go.

AJ