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The Imminent Demise of SORBS
An anonymous reader lets us know about the dire straits the SORBS anti-spam blacklist finds itself in. According to a notice posted on the top page, long-time host the University of Queensland has "decided not to honor their agreement with... SORBS and terminate the hosting contract." The post, signed "Michelle Sullivan (Previously known as Matthew Sullivan)," says that the project needs either to "find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia" or to find a buyer. Offers are solicited for the assets of SORBS as an ongoing anti-spam service — it's now handling over 30 billion DNS queries per day. An update to the post says "A number of offers have already been made, we are evaluating each on their own merits." Failing a successful resolution, SORBS will cease operations on July 20, 2009 at 12 noon Brisbane time. Such a shutdown could slow or disrupt anti-spam efforts for large numbers of mail hosts worldwide.
Mod parent up. The death of SORBS would be a net gain in the fight against spam. Blacklisting entire ISP's who are "insufficiently responsive" only makes sense if you don't care whether email gets delivered or not.
doc
I don't know if this is subterfuge, but:
http://www.iadl.org/sorbs/sorbs-story.html
You're kidding, right?
They have done more to give legitimate anti-spam efforts a black eye than ANY legislative attempts to 'solve' the problem ever could.
I -used- to believe that 'collateral damage' was a legitimate 'tactic' in the fight against spammers. I've grown up since then.
You get a big high five from me on that. On my previous job, SORBS caused us a lot of problems. It was very difficult to get off their lists once they listed you and if I remember correctly they also had a policy of not telling you why you were listed to begin with. I remember that one of the guys in our main European office was able to make friends with one of the SORBS guys in the same country and get some information about why we were blacklisted. Normally they didn't tell you why you were blacklisted, but this was some "countryman to countryman" special favor this SORBS guy did for us. We had a lot of email problems because some customers would use only SORBS for dealing with spam so if you're on the list, your email doesn't go through to them. I'm not saying that SORBS couldn't have been a useful minor part of an anti-spam solution, but all I saw was customers who blindly trusted SORBS and only SORBS and that made our life hell. I agree that I no longer think that SORBS' collection of tactics is legitimate. There are better ways to deal with spam and if SORBS dies, well, sign me up to dance on their grave.
I run an ISP in the midwest. SORBS has caused so many problems, I don't want to bore you all with them here. I briefly talked with Mr(s?) Sullivan via email back in 07 about several problems he caused by blocking subnets we had on both Nuvox and XO. His response to my email (which was long but detailed), I paster here for brevity:
---------snip---------
F_ck off.
Yours trully,
ms
---------snip---------
Hopefully, she/he takes up dancing at a crossdress clubs and stays the _hell_ off the internet.
ROM's being charged for: http://vampire.isux.com/ROMs/
Dubious images: http://vampire.isux.com/pics/x/
So what's going on Matthew... I mean, Michelle?
5468652047616D65
Sorry if I offended you. That was a Suzanne Vega reference. Maybe SV isn't geeky enough for /.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"A lot of people have had their lives turn into a living hell because of some listing on SORBS." Yes, and because SORBS volunteers were at times unprofessional and trollish in their responses for removal, it is just as well they are shutdown. Most other RBL volunteers would not behave this way, except SPEWS or whatever name changed to.
Can you provide all the domains you host, so that I can get as many mail admins together to arbitrarily block your servers, and demand "donations" to unblock them?
Thanks in advance, you worthless pile of trash.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is the best news I've heard all week!
SORBS is a blight on the anti-spam effort front and should have been run out of town on a rail years ago. It has done more damage to the perception of anti-spam lists than any other single entity on the internet. Hell, some spammers are better behaved and have better morals than the operator(s) of SORBS. I would literally turn to Microsoft or McAffee for anti-spam solutions before I'd even consider SORBS.
I hope the dirtbags that ran SORBS end up destitute in a gutter somewhere.
kdawson should've included the disclosure that SourceForge, one of Slashdot's sister companies, is a sponsor of SORBS. There's an ad on the right side of the SORBS main page touting this fact, so it's not like it should've been difficult for him to find to point out in the summary.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
It's worth noting that pointing the extortion racket out during communications intended to get you removed from said blacklist will result in you never hearing another word from the people at SORBS. Funny thing though: After referring (numerous) complaining customers to SORBS as the source of all their woes I found myself removed from the blacklists in short order. Odd how that works.