Coincidence or Conspiracy?

I thought it might be interesting to see what data there is on the internet that shows a comparison between blacklists. There is not that much to look at and a search on your favourite search engine will likely yield something like the following;

http://www.sdsc.edu/~jeff/spam/cbc.html is a list of performances but no graph or details of errors. The list is showing the top three as:
1st L2.Apews.org
2nd Zen.Spamhaus.org
3rd b.Barracudacentral.org

Interestingly it has Apews as being the best blacklist and as we know it is free to use for both business and personal. Spamhaus has many years providing antispam solutions but they also have subscription services, not everyone may use their data for free. The same is true for many other antispam solution providers therefore if the spam problem were to cease tomorrow, quite a few folks would be out of a job. In fact, anyone that earns money out of spam wants or even needs spam to continue.

Lets see what else we can find,
http://spamlinks.net/filter-dnsbl-lists.htm#local refers to a long out-dated L2.Apews.org data link namely that of a mirror that was formerly provided by Sorbs.net so the spamlinks.net website is not up to date.

http://www.declude.com/Articles.asp?ID=97 no mention of Apews.org in their list, not even historically, so not very accurate then.

http://www.dnsbl.info/dnsbl-list.php no mention of Apews.org, another not very accurate source.

http://www.spambouncer.org/reference/blocklists.shtml no mention of Apews.org, another not very accurate source.

http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dnsbl-comparison.html refers to L1.Apews.org but not L2.Apews.org. L1 is a dataset containing domain names only and L2 is all IP addresses. We have found domain name blacklists to be virtually a waste of time for our servers and email flows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_blacklists no mention of Apews.org, you would think that wikipedia would at least refer to it.

http://www.intra2net.com/en/support/antispam/ started off showing test data but then stopped after the Apews.org servers were attacked by DDOS stating that the blacklist is no longer available. There is even a special note on the Apews News web page to the websmaster of intra2net.com telling him that they are out of date with their facts.

http://www.techtheft.info/zones/?expand=50 no mention of Apews.org, another inaccurate source.

http://cbl.abuseat.org/faq.html does refer to Apews.org in the part about other blacklists but talks about high false positives which was true a couple years ago and before for not for a long time now. Perhaps the CBL Administrators will start posting their FP details here :-)

http://www.moensted.dk/spam/ does include Apews.org for tests

http://multirbl.valli.org/index.php does include Apews.org for tests

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/DnsBlocklists no mention of Apews.org yet the product SpamAssassin is a scoring solution so it should be even more suited to the use of Apews.org data since the score value for a listing can be adjusted.

http://www.dnsbl.com Al Iverson started testing Apews.org data for a couple of years then just as the catch rate started to surpass existing blacklists, he stopped his testing. Our results show that just after he stopped is when the FP began to gradually reduce until it reached commercially acceptable levels (said to be approx 0.5% or not more than 1%) well over a year ago.

Anyone add to the above? We will keep looking...