SORBS Blocklist Reportedly Sold For $451K 88
palegray.net writes "SORBS, a well-known email blocklist provider, has reportedly been sold for $451k. Early reports indicate an acquisition by GFI, a company specializing in various communications services. In recent years, SORBS has been the target of frequent accusations of mismanagement and poor conduct, leading many to wonder if this turn in events might signal a chance for improved behavior. Citing lack of ISP support, the blocklist released statements earlier this year that they would be shuttering their operation."
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
It is unfortunate that SORBS has gotten a bad rap. Although it has been plagued on the administrative side of things, its list was still helpful in detecting and removing spam.
So is unplugging your mailserver. It'd get roughly the same number of false positives, except without the malice.
Re:Shutting down (Score:3, Insightful)
I did not like my interaction with SORBS (Score:4, Insightful)
I was one of the people that had a very bad experience with SORBS.
My company got a new ISP with an external block. I'm sure at some point that block had been used as a dynamic range. I had not set a PTR record (because the IP of the mail server changed at the last second), my PTR and A record for that mail server were not set to 12 hours (seriously, who does that?), and I was banned on the SORBS list. I had an SPF record, you could obviously see that I'm part of a legitimate organization, and it would have taken maybe 2 minutes of work for an physical admin to realize that this was a mistake.
It took two support tickets with SORBS, 5 calls to my ISP, and around 10 days to get off the list. In the meantime, we could not contact certain people using it. And what's worse is that the only solution that the admin of SORBS had was to get everyone to stop using the SORBS list. I think that the TTL requirements are the worst part of their solution.
In my opinion, an unattended, automated black list is worse than the problem of too much spam. You are blocking valid mails, and because you are blocking it at the IP level, the end user doesn't even see it show up in their spam bucket many times. If SORBS had a single admin, checking their email once a day, they could easily filter out some of these issues.
I encouraged several anti-spam vendors to stop using their services for this reason, through the different companies that we interact with. There are several other blacklists that do their job well, there is no need to use an unattended blacklist.
Re:I did not like my interaction with SORBS (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the other poster explained my position perfectly well, he gets the issue. The fact that I could get delisted within 10 days is pretty impressive for being listed there, it's normally months. And that's only because my ISP had problems with them before because the guy blocked /20's from them on a regular and repeated basis, it looks like mostly virus related.
And both ISPs were running at the same time, but you can only send mail out one direction. Am I supposed to short circuit our entire operations across our network just because we cannot send mail? It wasn't even something we even noticed for two days. You can't relay your mail through your ISP for a large company either.
So, ask yourself, which is worse, extra spam in your mailbox, or a valuable mail from a business partner to you getting dropped with no notice to you. Because if you honestly think it's the first thing, then just block 0.0.0.0/0 already and then you won't get any spam. But make sure to give them a bunch of things to fill out to make it look like you'll get right on reading their mail!
In the future, just make sure to check your new mail server IP against the blacklists beforehand. And when he says 'TTL of 12 hours', just do it already and don't argue how DNS is supposed to work.