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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.

1 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Are RBL's really finished by Albanach · · Score: 4, Interesting
    We, and many others, still use RBLs as a front line tool to stop spam. Generally it'll stop several thousand emails a day from even entering the mail system.

    Spamassassin is great, we have sever custom rules and find it very effective. However it is resource intensive, especially if you are to add features like OCR detection of image spam.

    Is it really the case that folk should be accepting all this traffic from known open relays and then spending processor cycles analyzing it?

    Is there a middle ground? Some third way that lets lets you reject as much as possible at the start of the SMTP transaction? Greylisting is certainly an option but it presents significant problems too - many companies simply won't respond. Automatic emails will be missed, signup to websites becomes problematic etc etc. What, if any, are the other options?