Slashdot Mirror
ORBZ Shuts Down
Tim Jackson writes: "In a depressing development for those wanting to protect themselves against spam, it appears that popular open relay database ORBZ (formerly at www.orbz.org) has shut down effective immediately - see here for the final post from ORBZ admin Ian Gulliver on the ORBZ list explaining the reasons behind the closure.
The 'Lotus Domino' issue he refers to is the issue he discovered in the course of running ORBZ and reported to Buqtraq, which means that certain SMTP envelopes (such as those sent by ORBZ when testing for open relays) cause Lotus Domino servers to go into a loop, effectively creating a DoS situation.
Unfortunately (but understandably), irrelevant of the merits of the case, Ian doesn't want to risk jail for the sake of spam fighting. Of course, if common sense prevailed, it would be the mail server vendor in court for producing insecure mail server software, not a third party for happening to send requests that unintentionally crash poorly-written servers."
It was never very good for anything but bouncing
legit emails and causing uneeded headaches anyhow.
Automated blacklists are just simply a bad idea. Period.
They were never any better than the spammers
themselves IMHO, employing the same kind of tactics
to try and cram an email through your server, and then
making your life miserable after suceeding.
Something like RBL is much better as there is actually
some human thought involved before sinking that sources
emails to
Have you painted a shed today?
Hmm ORBZ is sending email to my server, un-solicited no less, sounds like Spam to me. ;)
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Talking about dumbass's, looked in a mirror lately?
Yea, orbz probes for open relays. SO WHAT! Maybe everyone should just forward there spam to YOU!
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong