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.

Oh my god

[bhenson]

Oh my god the spam is burning, burning I tell you

No Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tell Michelle to "man up" and let you stay . . .

Re:Explanation please

[MichaelSmith]

She looks like a really good girl, as girls go.

I didn't know Kevin Sorbo was sick.

[fyrie]

RIP Herc.

Sorry pal

[coryking]

And I realize you aren't the kind of idiot who blocks based on SORBS (or god forbid SPEWS, remember them?), and you are an ISP so if you were filtering based on SORBS you wouldn't have much business anyway, so I'm not really talking about you--I'm talking about small to medium sized businesses and other hotspots of cluelessness... "Me" in this case is my ISP and my customers trying to send email to *you* and your funky smelling email servers. In other words, imagine if some asshole listed *your* ISP or one of your upstreams in SORBS... Your (er, my) customers are now bitching to *you* (er, me). This is what I'm ranting about here.

If you weren't willing to work with our support staff and provide us the necessary information to understand where our efforts were failing, you are useless.

If you are filtering inbound email based 100% on SORBS, you are clueless and it would be a waste of my time to deal with you. Why? Either you are ignorant (thus it wouldn't do me any good anyway) or you are an asshole who does this for kicks, in which case you'd tell me to FOAD. As such, talking to you is a waste of time.

I used to tell our sales staff we didn't want [you as a customer]

You are the IT guy. Why would they listen to you? The probably already hate your guts for installing some other spite-ware or have them change their password every week. They dont listen to you and they dont like you (again, I'm not talking about you sir, but the SORBS filtering BOFH guy--ISP's are typically not the type to filter this way anyway). My calling them is just more ammo to go after you. It is politics my friend :-)

Otherwise take your business to AOL or Comcast

Funny enough, AOL has a 24 hour 1-800 number you can call to talk with the postmaster.

Re:Heh.. you will find a lot of hostility

[NitroWolf]

Holy shit, SPEWS. I had forgotten about that... the guy was worse than SORBS. Wasn't he the creator of Courier as well? How can someone that messed up create something like Courier? Or maybe I am thinking of someone else...

But yeah, SPEWS was a giant bag of shit. Thanks for reminding me there was something worse than SORBS.

Re:Um, is this at all credible?

[kv9]

http://www.iadl.org/sorbs/sorbs-story.html

I don't care how real or fake that is, but the drama is absolutely delicious.

Re:Not that disrespectful

[idlemachine]

You've got to face the music, to Joe six-pack you're not a girl, you're a post-op transsexual.

Or to put it in a way /.ers will understand: you're not a Mac, you're OSX running on hackintosh hardware.

Re:Not that disrespectful

[Shatrat]

If you've got more X's than Y's then you're genetically female and vice versa.

I think the only way to have more Y's than X's is to be from west virginia or european royalty.

Re:Asshats

[orngjce223]

I'll oblige ya. Here's the copypasta, filled in for your convenience:

 

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
(X) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!