Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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."
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.