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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.

2 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.

  2. 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