ORDB.org Going Offline

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.

I'll miss' em

[laughing rabbit]

Even though it took a long time to get my own domain off their list after I left a mis-configured server out in the wild, I really appreciate all they have done over the years. Who will take up the mantle next?

Are RBL's really finished

[Albanach]

We, and many others, still use RBLs as a front line tool to stop spam. Generally it'll stop several thousand emails a day from even entering the mail system.

Spamassassin is great, we have sever custom rules and find it very effective. However it is resource intensive, especially if you are to add features like OCR detection of image spam.

Is it really the case that folk should be accepting all this traffic from known open relays and then spending processor cycles analyzing it?

Is there a middle ground? Some third way that lets lets you reject as much as possible at the start of the SMTP transaction? Greylisting is certainly an option but it presents significant problems too - many companies simply won't respond. Automatic emails will be missed, signup to websites becomes problematic etc etc. What, if any, are the other options?

Re:SORBS

[gclef]

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).

I'm not willing to pay Trend Micro for access to what used to be MAPS for my one, small domain, and I haven't found anyone other than SORBS offering a collection of dial-up addresses as a DNS blacklist. If there are other, reliable, dial-up blacklists, I'd love to hear about them.

How nice of them to let us know....

[NerveGas]

    By giving people one entire day to remove their mailer configuration, they didn't leave people much time. Of course, that's sort of moot, I noticed early last week that my mailer wasn't getting responses from them any more, causing timeout delays on the query for every incoming message.

    Ah, well. I guess I shouldn't complain, since this one inconsiderate act is vastly overshadowed by the usefulness they've provided over the years.