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Comments: 290 +- IT: The Imminent Demise of SORBS on Tuesday June 23, @07:47PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday June 23, @07:47PM
from the don't-let-it-be-bought-by-a-spammer dept.
from the don't-let-it-be-bought-by-a-spammer dept.
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicspam.gif); width:81px; height:64px;
spam
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicinternet.gif); width:70px; height:73px;
internet
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.
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Submission: Imminent SORBS demise by Anonymous Coward
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No big loss! (Score:5, Insightful)
A blacklist that charges you to get your IP removed will inevitably block far more than real spammers.
Re:No big loss! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In their words, "it's not extortion as *we* don't see any of the money." It's still bullshit.
I've had issue with them for many years... their "spamtrap" list is 100% untrustable. It only takes one email EVER to get on the list. They provide zero evidence of how you got on the list, just that you are on it. Enties never, ever, expire. And to get off the list... you have to "make a donation." (But if you're google, you get removed without ever knowing you were listed.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a fixed IP address (according to my provider, BizNetvigator - I'm paying for a fixed address at least!) but according to SORBS I am in a "dynamic IP range", and they can not and will not unlist my IP address. As a result I am forced to relay my mails through the mail server of my provider. Totally unnecessary but it's the only way to assure delivery of e-mails. Many of my mails are rejected and bounce at smtp handshake level, I guess there will be plenty that are silently dropping it - both I conside
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So talk to your provider. They're the ones misrepresenting your IP space.
But that name says it all really. You're just a spammer, aren't you?
Mart
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Blacklists are more than just a pain, they're as much a cancer on SMTP infrastructure as spam. And among cancers, SORBS is the worst. I'll be glad to see it die.
Oh my god (Score:4, Funny)
*snort* (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:*snort* (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Parent
Re:*snort* (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, this would let more spam through spam filters, really.
Parent
Re:*snort* (Score:5, Informative)
The -smart- people are doing precisely that.
The problem is that there really are still people out there who are using lists, such as SORBS, as absolute arbiters in what is, or is not, from a spam source.
Thankfully, this number is shrinking daily as they realize just how broken some of these lists have been as a matter of policy.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are not a lot of products out there that support anything but blocking based on those RBL's.
I would love to find a proprietary product out there that uses the RBL's like that and also provides the features I am looking for.
So far I have not run into too many problems with the outright blocking though. I figure if there is a real problem, that I will get a support call from a customer and I can act accordingly. So far, no calls after 3 years of running like this with quite a number of mail clients an
You dont count (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:(of course, I may have mis-read you) (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Heh.. you will find a lot of hostility (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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:Heh.. you will find a lot of hostility (Score:4, Insightful)
> It is SORBS that I have an issue with. SORBS was created out of pure spite.
No, you're confusing "spite" with "greed". There's a difference. Spite is blacklisting a spammer's ISP in a fit of anti-spam zealotry. Greed is blacklisting a spammer's ISP hoping to extort a huge amount of money from them so their customers can send email again, and then blacklisting them again right after you un-blacklist them (yes, SORBS does this).
Good riddance to them. They've done nothing but tarnish the reputation of legitimate RBLs.
Spamcop, Spamhaus, and Uceprotect are plenty of RBL for me.
Parent
Sorry pal (Score:3, Funny)
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 o
Never said turn off the spam filter (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously you can't turn that off. I said "stop blocking based on SORBS". Huge, huge difference. And yes, there are idiots who block based on nothing more then SORBS. Ask me how I know.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>I would love to find a proprietary product out there that uses the RBL's like that and also provides the features I am looking for.
http://spamassassin.apache.org/ [apache.org]
Why does the solution have to be proprietary? SA works great. Out of thousands of spams that come into my account per day, maybe only 1 or 2 make it through, and there's no almost no false positives lately.
Re:*snort* (Score:5, Informative)
And before anyone starts to give me any guff about being soft on spam -
I've been known to nuke accounts, and not bother asking questions. I chased down the Empire Towers group and helped put an end to them. I spent 18 months cleaning up the -very- tarnished reputation of a now bought out web host almost 10 years ago, and have the scars to prove it. I hunted a spammer down and ratted him out to his own mother in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
The news regarding Ralsky had me drop a shot in celebration.
Believe me - I -detest- spam. At the same time, the methods utilized by SORBS were ineffective, and most legitimate hosts and providers stopped using them years ago.
Selective DNSRBL systems, as a practical method, WORK. Blocking residential cable from sending email? Hella good idea, for example. Blocking known dial-up ranges, as well. Blocking webhosts in an attempt to get their customer base to force them into canceling contracts that may cost the web host hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars? Nuh-uh.
When 'collateral damage' was useful, losses MIGHT have hit 10k. Now? Talking millions? Businesses will buy a new IP block and move the affected customers, and call it a day. Especially if they're blocked not because a customer has been an idiot, per se, but because the customer was hacked and used as a bot.
So, yeah. Rock on with your bad selves.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When 'collateral damage' was useful,
For some of us, that was never the case. There are three viable ISPs in my city: Qwest, cable, and the local mom-and-pop. I went with the latter to host my little home server because I knew the admins and the company had a good reputation. Now, suppose SORBS blocks [1] their upstream. What am I supposed to do, exactly? Switch to one of the mega-ISPs that will actively try to prevent me from running a server?
No, the whole idea of collateral damage only looks good to sociopaths or people who've never had
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You could take a look at VPN providers; I've noticed that some VPN providers provide solutions for exactly the problem you're having: static ip, configurable reverse, etc. At around $10-$15 per month it's certainly more affordable than a 'business DSL', and about on par with the cheapest virtual hosts you can get.
And as an added plus, that would also allow you to switch providers at will without having to change any configurations for your servers.
Re:*snort* (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Um, is this at all credible? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if this is subterfuge, but:
http://www.iadl.org/sorbs/sorbs-story.html [iadl.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.iadl.org/sorbs/sorbs-story.html
I don't care how real or fake that is, but the drama is absolutely delicious.
Summary is absurd (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Death to SORBS (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I didn't know Kevin Sorbo was sick. (Score:4, Funny)
RIP Herc.
What's this then, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
ROM's being charged for: http://vampire.isux.com/ROMs/ [isux.com]
Dubious images: http://vampire.isux.com/pics/x/ [isux.com]
So what's going on Matthew... I mean, Michelle?
Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
The death of SORBS should be good news to any decent ISP mail admin out there. Nothing like being forced to pay to get your mail server IP removed from a blacklist because you somehow can't keep the thousands of residential customers on your service from occasionally getting a virus and sending a few spams.
SORBS sucks and has for years. Don't get me wrong, I hate spam as much as the next guy, but sometimes a few get through, that's just how it is.
Luckily we haven't had much trouble with them lately since it seems that the vast majority of mail admins came to their senses and stopped using SORBS... frankly I'm surprised they need that many servers.
some good DNSBLs (Score:3, Informative)
I recommend Spamhaus XBL [spamcop.net] and Spamcop Blocking List [spamhaus.org] .
Spamcop used to have problems, but I think they resolved them a couple years ago [dnsbl.com].
Back when http://stats.dnsbl.com/ [dnsbl.com] was operational I used their data to give me a quick leg up on figuring out which lists to look at. Then I checked out the lists for how they operate and then did a performance analysis.
Aside from policy/operation, two things that were particularly important to me were false positives and overlap. These lists get very low false positives and they combine nicely.
Old stats:
http://stats.dnsbl.com/zen.html [dnsbl.com]
http://stats.dnsbl.com/spamcop.html [dnsbl.com]
Don't let the door hit you in the ass... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
full disclosure (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:full disclosure (Score:4, Informative)
SourceForge isn't the sister company, SourceForge is Slashdot's owner. The PARENT company.
But I think it's only listed because Sorbs has a project on sourceforge.net, in which case Sourceforge "sponsors" eleventy bajillion people and companies anyway.
Parent
Nothing's wrong with SORBS (Score:3, Interesting)
I use SORBS professionally. It works. It stops spam. The few times IP space from our customers got listed, they got delisted within 24 hours after contacting SORBS by e-mail. All it cost me was registering an account for my employer at SORBS.
As usual in the discussion on blocklisting, Slashdot is being overrun by, ehm, 'legitimate biznizmen' and their supporters, and people who know jack shit about blocklisting and its history, but believe those who shout the loudest.
Mart
Re:Explanation please (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Explanation please (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Not that disrespectful (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Not that disrespectful (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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:The REAL story (Score:4, Insightful)
How is what Michelle did any of your business?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I asked myself the same question. In all fairness, that is how she signed off in the link included in TFS, but I still think its inclusion wasn't strictly needed for the "News for Nerds" aspect of the story....
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Possible Alternate Hosting (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:SORBS is probably useless (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)