Over 1 month without any FP

As you can see, the last false positive that we found was on Feb 9 and nothing since. We are the only ones to have published email headers in support of those false positives and each one has been delisted by the APEWS.org Administrators. The folks you have seen posting removal requests here are people that believe that their IP addresses should not be listed. We have seen that most, but not all, have been delisted.

The SPEWS listing model was to use whole CIDR blocks in order to pressure the ISP. It involved listing the entire block without regard for individual IP addresses and therefore there was collateral damage which was not favored by many. In order for that method to work it requires that users tolerate the collateral damage until such time as the ISP cleaned up the CIDR. That method was flawed because users, network Administrators etc, would rather tolerate spam than collateral damage.

After analysing the APEWS.org data over a period of time we can see that they are no longer following the same model as SPEWS. A few years ago when they first became a replacement for SPEWS, it could have been said that their method was very close if not the same. However, the fact that false positives have reduced dramatically and having probed the listed CIDR, APEWS.org seem to be cutting holes in CIDR for trusted senders and accordingly reducing collateral damage leaving a binary reputation index.