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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.
A blacklist that charges you to get your IP removed will inevitably block far more than real spammers.
Oh my god the spam is burning, burning I tell you
"Such a shutdown could slow or disrupt anti-spam efforts for large numbers of mail hosts worldwide. "
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.
She looks like a really good girl, as girls go.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I don't know if this is subterfuge, but:
http://www.iadl.org/sorbs/sorbs-story.html
Any mail admin who's depending in any significant way on the anti-spam wasteland of SORBS should be on their way to apply for jobs at local fast food restaurants as soon as possible. Even if someone handling spam control for a decent size business actually believed in SORBS' accuracy or effectiveness, the only effect of SORBS disappearing from the face of the Earth should have is a slight uptick in spam being caught by filters slightly further down the path to their users' mailboxes.
Seriously, is there anyone out there who isn't use a multi-tiered, inter-connected array of spam filtering methods at this stage of the game? ~96% of the mail going to my users is spam. My worst offender has some ~5300 messages a day of spam being filtered prior to reaching their inbox. If my best filter were rendered worthless tomorrow, I wouldn't expect to hear any complaints from users. (of course, I'd be pretty unhappy.)
I think honeypots are probably my best weapon again spammers at the moment, followed by my keyword blacklists.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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.
RIP Herc.
How is what Michelle did any of your business?
Brielle
Your parent is right. There does exist a set of clueless people who straight filter based on RBL's like SORBS. Sure, filter your home mail server any way you want, but the *second* you have third-party people using your system (or the second you run the mail server for a business), you should be outright fired for filtering based solely on something like SORBS.
That is because I dont waste my time calling you. I call your boss and your sales department. If you really are running a business mail server and filtering based on SORBS, you are basically clueless and I'll gain nothing talking to you Your sales staff though, I'm sure they'd be happy to know you are blocking my customers inquiries into your companies products. And I'm probably also sure that if you are the type who filters like that, they probably have a bunch of other issues with the way you run their systems and this just might be the straw that broke the camels back.
Wow. That's a lot of hostility there.
First off, I never said I used SORBS. I did some research first about which ones would probably be best, respond to delisting requests in a timely fashion, and could provide me with a list that was had a lot of maintenance. Spamhaus and Spamcop are fairly decent and AFAIK, they DO respond to delisting requests and don't just put IP blocks up willy nilly.
I'm hardly an idiot. If I could find an open source software package capable of doing what I require, I would have gone that way a long time ago. As it stands, I have to use a proprietary software package that does not allow me to weight the incoming emails based of *any* RBL's. I can only refuse the connection based on the RBL's.
My original point stands. You want to be so incredibly hostile and label anyone that dares to use a RBL (or maybe just SORBS, could you clarify?) as an idiot, but fail to realize just how many mail server software packages out there don't do what you are asking for.
Try taking the hostility down a notch or two, and if you are so knowledgeable about mail server product that do offer weighting based on RBL's, why not just post it here for people to read? Maybe there are people new to running a mail server, don't understand the implications of a RBL (which hardly makes them an idiot), and would gladly implement a better solution.
Or... you could just attack people personally and denounce them for being idiots without actually writing anything productive while foaming at the mouth.
A lot of people have had their lives turn into a living hell because of some listing on SORBS. Thus if it wasn't me who chewed you out, somebody else probably would have :-)
Spamhaus's PBL?* I filter on that... the friggen ISP's make up most of that list. I'm pretty damn sure AOL and friends filter off that list too and my motto is "if AOL or Yahoo filters mail based on XYZ policy, I will too". Plus, you can get off that list on a web page.
It is SORBS that I have an issue with. SORBS was created out of pure spite. So my apologies random internet person :-)
* Excepting Godaddy who is fucking insane. Those assholes filter *URL's pointing to a PBL'd IP that are embedded in a message*!!! Worse, they dont tell you. Had fun learning that.
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
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.
I just want to point out that that's not generally considered respectful language
I'm not so sure that holding a different definition of the word "girl" than you do is really disrespectful. I get what you're saying but you've got to understand that to the population at large there is a difference between someone born biologically female and someone who surgically removed their genitals and started hormone therapy (or whatever other combination of measures you took to legally change your gender). For example, you never could and never will bear a child. Not that all women can, but they've generally got a higher likelihood of being able to do so. So people like to have different words for those different things. You've got to face the music, to Joe six-pack you're not a girl, you're a post-op transsexual.
I get what you're trying to say but I also feel like you're trying to strongarm others into changing the definitions of their words. If somebody doesn't think you're "really a girl" and you take offense to that, you're just picking a fight over semantics. Go ahead and wait until they say something really inflammatory and hateful before you bust out the righteous indignation, you'll win more hearts and minds.
The reason SORBS is so universally reviled by a lot of the anti-spam crowd is because the creator and the whole cadre of folks that maintained (and I use that word hesitantly) really didn't seem nearly as interested in battling spam as in enforcing their own bizarre view of who should and should not be sending email. The entire ethos was abusive and ego-stroking. The last time I had problems, the one thing I noticed that was different than my old battles with this pack of scumbags was just how few mail servers seem to be using it now. Hotmail was what forced me to even bother dealing with it, because my employer does a lot of correspondence with people on Hotmail addresses (another cancer on SMTP). My general attitude about mail admins who reject messages because SORBS blacklists my IP address is "fuck you", because those admins, as I've said elsewhere, are either morons or just lazy and don't want to put the effort into building a good, solid, rugged SMTP server.
What I can't believe is that SORBS still has some defenders, when my experience from the years when I was working most of my days as an admin for a few hundred domains was that SORBS was just as bad as spam. I really do hope that it is allowed to die, and maybe a few more retarded mail admins finally get the hint and start implementing measures that don't essentially poison SMTP.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.