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ORDB.org Going Offline

Posted by Hemos on from the the-end-of-the-road dept.

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.

9 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. The reasons by jginspace · · Score: 5, Informative

    The reasons are, expanding from TFA: "open relay RBLs are no longer the most effective way of preventing spam from entering your network as spammers have changed tactics in recent years, as have the anti-spam community."

    I concur.

    1. Re:The reasons by BenFranske · · Score: 3, Informative
      Which is nearly what they said in the article:
      We encourage system owners to remove ORDB checks from their mailers immediately and start investigating alternative methods of spam filtering. We recommend a combination involving greylisting and content-based analysis (such as the dspam project, bmf or Spam Assassin).
  2. Efficiency by cockroach2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm not sure I agree about the lack of efficiency: On a "normal" day my server which hosts about 60 mailboxes blocks between 5000 and 6000 e-mail messages (4992 yesterday, 4936 Sunday, 5615 Saturday, 5763 Friday etc.) using ordb, spamhaus and dsbl. While it's true that I still have to use spamassassin for additional content filtering, that's more than 5000 messages a day which don't even enter the system - I consider that quite a lot.

  3. RBLs not so trivial by jblakezachary · · Score: 4, Informative

    The ORDB notice makes it sound like we should all abandon RBL lookups all together. I operate a small GroupWise domain ~about 300 users~ and checked my GWAVA stats when I read the article. 78,000 of the last 155,000 inbound messages were blocked as RBL hits. This first step in ridding most of our spam takes a load off of the more server intensive methods of filtering mail and still seems very relevant. I will be sad to see ORDB go.

    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

  4. Re:Are RBL's really finished by Sentry21 · · Score: 3, Informative
    On my server, I use greylisting and RBLs, as well as other checks. In the span of one week, we received 128,000 e-mail attempts, 5000 of which were successful. The checks below block huge amounts of spam, to the point where I've actually removed spamassassin because the only messages it gets a chance to check are all legitimate.

    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).

    smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
        reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
        reject_non_fqdn_sender,
        reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
        reject_invalid_hostname,
        permit_mynetworks,
        permit_sasl_authenticated,
        reject_unauth_destination,
        reject_unauth_pipelining,
        reject_rbl_client opm.blitzed.org,
        reject_rbl_client list.dsbl.org,
        reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,
        reject_rbl_client sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org,
        reject_rbl_client dynablock.njabl.org
  5. Re:SORBS by GigsVT · · Score: 3, Informative

    Don't forgot the "we blocked you because you used the wrong ISP" people, SPEWS.

    --
    I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
  6. Re:I wonder... by nuzak · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

    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.

    --
    Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
  7. Re:Good case why not to trust "community" services by mephistus · · Score: 3, Informative
    As far as community services go, I always put ORDB in the category of "means well, but a half assed effort." I inherited a job taking care of the mail servers at a company I used to work at, and I came to find out that we had an open relay and had been blacklisted. If memory serves me right, I want to say this was almost 5 years ago.

    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.

  8. Re:Good case why not to trust "community" services by scoof · · Score: 3, Informative

    ORDB always attempted to notify the administrators of listed servers, several variations on the postmaster@server would have been sent and ignored by the people maintaining the server before you.

    --
    -- Andreas