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."

Comments

Just great

[bitva]

My company *used* to be an ISP. Our mail server was flagged an open-relay and instead of upgrading our crappy ass version of Sendmail to allow our customers to send e-mail to Pacbell customers (who was blocking us) we just decided to get out of the ISP business all together.

Guess we should've just waited out ORBZ's demise.

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!

[matth]

I for one am happy that ORBZ is gone. I run a mail server on a dial-up modem and have more then once gotten a reply back that ORBZ IS BLOCKING SPAM FROM AN OPEN RELAY IP.. guess what? I'm not running an open relay but I guess someone else was. Well I'm sick of it. I'm glad Ian is gone with his Orbz stuff. As far as blocking.. that's up to the end user.. not some little guy who wants to start a list.