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ORBS Lookup Entries Undergo Major Revamping

Posted by timothy on from the lovely-spam-wonderful-spam- dept.

John Bajana-Bacalle writes: "I noticed this morning that as of 2001/2/1 relays.orbs.org has been decommisioned, ORBS has announced. The announcement further mentions some serious new testing/checking/hostname additions, about a dozen of them, that will greatly increase the granularity of the ORBS results. A benefit seems to be the end user now has fine granularity in the results s/he will get back, obviating some of the bullshit griping that surrounds ORBS most often. More power to us and them. =)"

4 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:good riddance by zyklone · · Score: 3

    Please,

    The largest cost of spam happens when mail is queued for users on mail servers and the time it takes for the user to read/delete the mail.

    ORBS tries to mail themselves through your mail server. If you don't want people to use your mail SERVICE then don't let them relay through it.

    But perhaps you are one of those who think it should be illegal to access a web server except by following a link from an authorized site.

  2. Some calculations.... by moz25 · · Score: 3

    The point is that these "honest" people are shoving the cost onto OTHER people. Therefore, they never make the investments, but do gather the profits. The fact that they often forge headers and use cracked servers does not contribute to their image.

    You admit that spam costs each person a few k of bandwidth. Let's say that an average junkmail is 5k in size. In an average mailing action we are talking about more than 1M addresses. This means at least 5GB of data transfer per mailing action.
    Multiply this by the number of spammers and you can begin to see the scope of the problem.

    It wouldn't be so much of a problem if they PAID to send their junk. One of the problems is that they victimize innocent people and they end up with damages ranging in the thousands of dollars so that the spammer in question can earn at most a few hundred.

    Perhaps this is why the term 'leeches' is often used with this sort of people.

    There is no fix on the number of junkmails one gets. You could be 'lucky' and get only a few per day or you could get over 50. If you try to be removed from the list you will get more junk.

    It is good that you have a tolerance for spam. I will consider you 'opt-in' if I ever feel the need to send bulkmails.

    Moz.

    --
    see a Text Widget
    1. Re:Some calculations.... by evanbd · · Score: 3

      It's relatively easy to get this kind of bandwidth cheaply. Just do what the spammers do: steal it. Use open relays and the like. But there are a few caches: it's illegal. it's unethical. it only works for spam -- you don't get that much bandwidth, you just get to use that much bandwidth for free to send many copies of the same thing. Also, open relays can only be used to steal bandwidth for email -- which is so small as to not be worth stealing UNLESS you plan to use it for spam. I personally have much less of a problem with companies that buy all their own badwidth and then send UCE from their own servers directly -- they are only stealing from the recipient, and not from some relatively innocent 3rd party whose bandwidth they stole. Some companies do this. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell which from the stuff that lands in your inbox. I would assume they are also the ones that seem relatively nice about giving you opt-out mechanisms, but I don't know.

  3. Hit 'em where it Hurts: This way is EZ and $$$$ by jcapell · · Score: 5

    (I got this idea from a previous post, but I've revised the link a bit)

    Once a day, go here and right-click on each link, select 'open in new window' and let the pages load.

    The expense will add up quite quick, I think!