We fired up the list on Tuesday, March 4, 2014. It’s been an interesting year.

A while back, we opened up a bunch of new spamtraps and the flood has taken us by surprise. Some of these are spamming so intensely that they have even caught the attention of the 800 pound gorilla. Most of our subjects do not reach this level of spamming activity, however, which is why we plan to continue to exist.

Prior to October 26, this list has been mostly an academic effort.

ClouDNS statistics show how often any domain for which they provide the services has been queried. On October 26, the number of queries jumped from practically nothing to tens of thousands per day. We welcome our first major user, whoever you are. Please monitor your logs for false positives and get back to us if our listings are affecting anything else but scientific spam attempts to you.

All viewers are advised to have a look at Jeffrey Beall‘s excellent writeup at List of Predatory Publishers. It wouldn’t be very far off to expect this DNSBL to eventually converge into a machine-readable form of the above.

As it says in the topic. TXT records of listings will contain the Subject line of the spam, the apparent From, and the date it was spotted, so there is some information as to why any given IP would be listed. They all will show up in blog posts here eventually, but for now, the two are not synchronized.

The list is operational as of March 4, 2013. The blog only just came about, though.