Slashdot Mirror
ORDB.org Going Offline
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.
Even though it took a long time to get my own domain off their list after I left a mis-configured server out in the wild, I really appreciate all they have done over the years. Who will take up the mantle next?
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
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.
Now if extortionist SORBS would die, the anti-spam communinity could refocus on dealing with actual spammers. SORBS never was a pillar of responsibility but the current practice of "dontate to a SORBS-approved charity to get off the list" is just plain wrong.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
If they've already shut down, I guess that explains the rather sudden and rather LARGE increase in spam I had sitting in my various mailboxes waiting for me this morning. :(
Can anyone suggest a good alternative? I'm using spamhaus, sorbs, and uceprotect at the moment, and no, I won't use spamcop. ordb HAD been an excellent fourth.
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." -- Tom Lehrer
If the RBLs go offline, will spammers shift back to using open relays? I suspect not; the bot-nets are harder to stop and, from the spammer's POV, probably more reliable. The dark side of distributed, highly redundant networks.
Still, it's pretty nice to think that they're going offline because they've largely solved the problem they were fighting. It's like declaring smallpox or polio extinct. And if they come back, we'll remember the formula.
I guess some of these groups have a rather large following, but how about actually linking to their page or to a wiki that describes what they do? For those of us lazy American's too lazy to cut and paste.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Thanks - that's not even two weeks notice.
More likely, they woke up one day and figured out they were sick of eating Ramen noodles while being taking for a ride by commercial leeches who never kicked back.
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?
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.
A "private" e-mail account, given only to family and close friends, whit a set of filtering rules to build the whitelist, and everything else run through bayesian filtering.
Between the two, I have to deal with very little spam.
OT:This is my 2,000th Slashdot comment...
Best Slashdot Co
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
You have a point, but Free Software is hardly "dying" ! That's a ridiculous claim to make. *More* Free Software is being produced and used today than ever before. Just take a look at Freshmeat or Sourceforge.
Of course, if commercial organisations did wake up and realise they have a responsibilty to help support developers whose software they use, then probably developers would have a more comfortable lifestyle, and project development would become more professional and better organised.
Also, software is different from a web service. If a developer abandons a Free Software project, the code is still out their for somebody else to build on, or perhaps the original developer will return to it after taking a break.
You're right, about 95% (or more) of the blocking is done by spamhaus (it is the first filter which is used, thus it's clear that they catch more than the others). Still, the ORDB guys basically say that open relay RBLs in general don't make much sense anymore which, as I consider spamhaus to be an open relay RBL too, I can't agree to.
For completeness' sake, here's the breakdown for yesterday:
- spamhaus: 4769 (96%)
- dsbl.org: 220 (4%)
- ordb.org: 3 (0%)
By giving people one entire day to remove their mailer configuration, they didn't leave people much time. Of course, that's sort of moot, I noticed early last week that my mailer wasn't getting responses from them any more, causing timeout delays on the query for every incoming message.
Ah, well. I guess I shouldn't complain, since this one inconsiderate act is vastly overshadowed by the usefulness they've provided over the years.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Since the Republican Congress "defeated spam" with their CAN-SPAM Act, I've noticed my incoming spam double every month for years
:)
CAN-SPAM took effect on 1 January 2004, so assuming you got 1 spam that month and it's doubled every month since, that means you're getting about 564 million spam emails a day now. I wouldn't want to be your ISP
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.
1. SORBS sucks... and they work because they suck. They assume any mail source is a spam source unless it got a rDNS record (wich may be quite hard to get on ADSL lines). /.).
...whoever find a working non-STASI-like (ie. SORBS) and open solution will get my vote for the Nobel Prize...
...and yes I do know about several methods for fighting spam but they are far from perfect... they are usually based on certificates and they do work pretty well... we do however need a solution in the SMTP and not an propriatary addon on top of it...
2. SpamHaus do a decent job and they don't make funny/crazy assumptions, and they do try to keep the list up to date.
3. Even content check does not block spam... spammers are sending pictures with their message... and they make those hard to run thru OCR (just like the Human-Check here on
4. A world wide law against spam would help but is not likely to happen.
Really?
The U.S. Senate voted 97-0 (with 3 nonvoting senators).
Congress voted in much a similar fashion: 392-5.
link
Jump off that hate bandwagon and realize you being screwed over by both parties.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
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
Perhaps you are asking about SPF.
o rk Spammers recently started forging my domain as their return address. I know this because I recieved a bucket-load of bounces every day until I blocked the catch-all address. All of that spam would have been blocked if the servers that bounced it had checked my SPF record first. It clearly specifies that all of the IP addresses where the spam is coming from are not authorized to serve email from my domain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framew
This is a simple, open standard that can eliminate spam from forged domains, which I would guess is most of it, at this point in history.
Parent needs to get a life.
The satire in question was written by anti-spam advocates; in part to ridicule amateur, armchair philosophers; who think that their knee-jerk response is better than anything the experts have come up over the years.
OTOH first time I saw
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
used. Kudos
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??