Spamhaus has announced the Spamhaus DBL, a new spam-blocking advisory list, based on near realtime listing of known spam 'landing page' domains. A new version of SpamAssassin with support for the DBL is available.

It will be interesting to see if the DBL includes domains registered by affiliate spammers, who are a constantly-growing nuisance, as well as the more conventional high-volume pills and fakes spam.

If the DBL does prove effective, we can expect to see spammers redouble their efforts to exploit 'clean' domains. For example, Microsoft's 'spaces.live.com' service is currently infested with spam landing pages. Other currently popular tactics used by spammers include exploiting URL shortening services, or simply using security loopholes to allow them to upload gateway pages to legitimate servers. These are not cases that can be detected by a domain-level blocklist like the DBL, or at least not without the risk of false positives.