Anonymous Postmaster Early Warning System
The Anonymous Postmaster Early Warning System (APEWS) is an anonymous service that maintains a list of IP address ranges (L2 list) and domain names (L1 list) belonging to internet service providers (ISPs) that the anonymous maintainers claim to be hosting spammers or failing to prevent their abuse of other networks' resources.
According to the only public forum communication ever released by APEWS,[1] the service was founded by people who observed that the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) was inactive, no longer maintained, and possibly dead. The maintainers chose to copy the look and feel of the SPEWS site, but unlike SPEWS, the APEWS list follows no discernable escalation policy, and provides no documentary evidence to justify its listings. Also unlike SPEWS, APEWS operates two blacklists:
- L1 - a Right-Hand Side Blacklist (RHSBL) that lists domains
- L2 - a Domain Name System Blacklist (DNSBL) that lists IP address ranges.
Validity and utility of the APEWS list
The widely-used resource at DNSStuff.com[2] recommends against using the APEWS list. APEWS lists at present approximately 40 percent of routable IPV4 address space, including, for instance, 12.0.0.0/9 (AS7018 AT&T WorldNet Services), rendering it useless in a production environment for simple blocking (accept/reject).
APEWS list may be used to use extra DNSBL tests for IP addresses in nets listed by APEWS e.g. using FEATURE(`anfi/rsdnsbl') in sendmail.
External links
References
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