ORDB.org Going Offline 156
Allan Joergensen writes "ORDB.org has announced that they will shut down their services after fighting open relays and spam for more than five and a half years.
The RBL DNS service and mailing lists will be taken down today (December 18, 2006) and the website will vanish by December 31, 2006." The reasons given tend to be the usual ones - volunteers have been focused on other things in life; my salute to those folks for keeping the service up as long as they did.
The reasons (Score:5, Informative)
I concur.
Re:The reasons (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Omnipotent awareness... or not (Score:3, Informative)
Efficiency (Score:3, Informative)
Spam control methodology (Score:3, Informative)
A "private" e-mail account, given only to family and close friends, whit a set of filtering rules to build the whitelist, and everything else run through bayesian filtering.
Between the two, I have to deal with very little spam.
OT:This is my 2,000th Slashdot comment...
RBLs not so trivial (Score:4, Informative)
For those of you relying on RBL lookups, the following are still available and seem to be very reliable, producing few to zero false positives:
zen.spamhaus.org
bl.spamcop.net
list.dsbl.org
Re:Are RBL's really finished (Score:4, Informative)
For anyone who's wondering, here's what we've got going on, plus amavisd/clamav doing virus scanning. This blocks all spam I get (used to be 30-200 messages per day that Spamassassin would catch).
Re:SORBS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good case why not to trust "community" services (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, if commercial organisations did wake up and realise they have a responsibilty to help support developers whose software they use, then probably developers would have a more comfortable lifestyle, and project development would become more professional and better organised.
Also, software is different from a web service. If a developer abandons a Free Software project, the code is still out their for somebody else to build on, or perhaps the original developer will return to it after taking a break.
Re:Are RBL's really finished (Score:2, Informative)
I haven't had any issues with greylisting. I know of no emails that I haven't eventually received and even web-page sign-ups/registrations have gotten through without a hitch.
There are also filters for postfix that can reject connections based on the age of the domain. If the domain is less than 4 days old, it's likely to be a spammer. I haven't implemented it yet but if the tide of spam swells again, that will be my next line of defense.
Re:Efficiency? (Score:2, Informative)
For completeness' sake, here's the breakdown for yesterday:
- spamhaus: 4769 (96%)
- dsbl.org: 220 (4%)
- ordb.org: 3 (0%)
Re:Are RBL's really finished (Score:3, Informative)
HTH
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
He didn't invent the list. That's the kind of laziness we're looking for.
He even used it for the checklist's intended reason -- as satire. EVERYTHING fails somewhere on that list.
Re:Already offline? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good case why not to trust "community" services (Score:3, Informative)
How did I come to find out that we had an open relay? Did ORDB notify us? Hell no. They just slapped us on their list, and our users started getting bounce messages from other mail servers. I fixed the problem quite easily once I knew about it, but the biggest problem was getting off the list!!! That was a whole other nightmare take took longer than hearing about the problem and fixing it.
So I say good riddance. Those guys are pretty bright and meant well, but my experience with them left me with a very bad impression. Hopefully they were more professional in recent years, but from the way they're ending their service, it sure as hell doesn't seem like it.
SORBS (Score:2, Informative)
2. SpamHaus do a decent job and they don't make funny/crazy assumptions, and they do try to keep the list up to date.
3. Even content check does not block spam... spammers are sending pictures with their message... and they make those hard to run thru OCR (just like the Human-Check here on
4. A world wide law against spam would help but is not likely to happen.
Re:Good case why not to trust "community" services (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SORBS (Score:2, Informative)
SORBS has one useful list: the dial-up DNS blacklist (spare me the diatribes about being able to send mail from a dynamic address. I know the arguments, but the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost of the spam coming from that address space).
True. Now, if only someone actually had an accurate list of dynamic IP addresses, this would be a good strategy, but since neither SORBS nor anyone else actually has one, it gets rather annoying for those of us who get our email bounced or eaten because some idiot has their mailserver configured to bounce mail from our perfectly static IP addresses that happens to be on one of these highly inaccurate lists.
Re:SORBS (Score:3, Informative)
For example my block is in the MAPS database despite having a proper reverse DNS, a properly setup DNS, a behaving MTA, etc. It is connected by ADSL but will be switched to fibre one of these days.
Dropping mail solely based on blacklists is stupid. Using it to score mails (in he spirit of what spamassassin does), in combination with other things, might be useful.