About TQM³

— David Cary Hart
Total Quality Management Consultant

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NEW: As of May, 2006 the data is mirrored and available for real time DNS query.

In the fall of 2004, I was looking for a simple, flexible method of eliminating the large volume of spam that originates from the Peoples Republic of China and South Korea. While our Postfix mail server supports CIDR maps it seemed preferable to offload that filtering to something that is specific to purpose.

I tried several solutions and, ultimately, discovered that Michael Tokarev's "RBLDNSD" was exactly what I was looking for. RBLDNSD is a name server that is specifically designed for this purpose. It is marvelously fast and consumes meager resources.

In January of 2005, I published an article in Fedora News; A how-to on RBLDNSD with Fedora Core 3 and Postfix. I included a link to our website to download a small sample of blocklists that the reader could use to deploy and test their installation. By that time, I had been experimenting with several means of automating the process of adding IP addresses to the list. I was also using spam traps across several domains. By February of 2005, the lists were made available, free of charge, to anyone who wants them. They can be obtained by downloading a daily tarball and by Rsync.

There are many fine blacklists maintained by credible organizations like Spamhaus and SORBS. Typically, the average corporate user will query these blacklists via DNS as clients connect to the mail server. The objective of the TQM³ blacklists is to offer a reliable data source that is stored for local access by the user's mail server. This provides either a complement or alternative to more traditional blacklists. The listing criteria is completely objective. It is intended to be fully automated and responsive. We place a high priority on handing, and responding to, removal requests.

Please note that the TQM³ DNSBL is a non-commercial endeavor. We welcome your comments, questions, suggestions, rants and raves. Please use the contact form.