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Long-Dead ORDB Begins Returning False Positives
Chapter80 writes "At noon today (Eastern Standard Time), the long dead ORDB spam identification system began returning false positives as a way to get sleeping users to remove the ORDB query from their spam filters. The net effect: all mail is blocked on servers still configured to use the ORDB service, which was taken out of commission in December of 2006. So if you're not getting any mail, check your spam filter configuration!"
Oldie but goldie: http://acme.com/mail_filtering/shame.html#dnsrbls
They arent being lost, simply being flagged as spam by the database. People will have to go into their respectave administration interface and "release" the mail and/or mark it as safe. Kind of a pain in the ass, but if your depending on a spam database that is over a year old, its not likley doing much for you anyway.
Because the requests will still come. And even without a response, the request will consume bandwidth that someone is paying for, and consuming an IP address that someone would like to re-use.
One connection refused doesn't take up a lot of bandwidth. Thousands of connections refused per day does. Clients often times aren't smart enough to figure out the site is down permanently.
That's precisely what they did for the last 15 months (a pretty reasonable amount of time):
DNS and the mailing lists will vanish today, December 18, 2006.I don't know... do they still own a machine that responds to DNS requests, and are therefore paying for bandwidth? Probably not.
Do they want to sell the domain to someone, who wouldn't want to get hit with a bandwidth bill as soon as they throw some servers up? More likely.
I tell you three times: At the volumes we're talking about, merely turning off the server does not solve the problem caused by people continuing to query it.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."