As you may have heard, ORF won the VBSpam Award for being super effective (caught 99.13% of spam emails during the test with zero false positives).
A lot of you guys asked about the configuration used during the test, so here it goes. We used a very basic, quite conservative configuration with the following test enabled:
- Reverse DNS (Normal sender domain validation, PTR check was turned off – default setting)
- HELO Blacklist (“Is malformed” and “is the same as the recipient domain” options on – default setting)
- SPF (blacklist on SoftFail disabled – default setting)
- DNS Blacklist (the recommended lists were enabled: SpamCop, Spamhaus ZEN, SORBS, NJABL)
- URL Blacklist (the recommended lists were enabled: Spamhaus DBL*, SURBL: Combined, uribl.com)
That’s it. Like I said, it was pretty basic :) You can lower the chance for false positives even more by using the Auto Sender Whitelist test, but we could not use that during the VB testing, as no outgoing emails were involved.
If you do not see the above mentioned DNS and URL blacklists in your configuration, please read our best practices guide for detailed instructions on updating your blacklist definition sets. You will also find some useful tips & tricks on fine-tuning ORF and increasing the catch rate even further, so it is a must read for every ORF user. If any questions arise, feel free to contact us: we are happy to assist.
*The URL Blacklist definition of Spamhaus DBL is not included in any versions of ORF as of writing this (4.4 and older), but you can download it from our site and import it easily