ordb.org Spam Blocker Rises from the Dead

Returning every address queried as being on its blacklist.

[pageoneresults]

2008-03-26

Spam blocker rises from the dead to bite lax email administrators
[itwire.com...]

Administrators of email systems should have stopped querying the database (relays.ordb.org) in December 2006 when it shut down, but some failed to do so. That was no problem until today, queries were simply rejected, but now the address of any email server presented is being returned as an open relay. This results in the querying system rejecting all incoming mails from that server.

[lammert]

From one of the comments in the article:

To avoid future denials of service that public blocklists can apparently cause, we will no longer use them as part of our anti-spam regime.

As soon as I heard of the ordb.org rearise I suspected that spammers might actually have restarted the ordb.org service with these errornous behaviour. There is no faster way to get people to loose trust in the public blocklist services than one day of blocking of all legitimate emails.

[Receptional Andy]

To avoid future denials of service that public blocklists can apparently cause, we will no longer use them as part of our anti-spam regime.

Community spam reporting remains vital, if you ask me.

[incrediBILL]

What I find pretty amusing that an administrator that doesn't keep up with the technology being used that went offline over a year ago now won't use those anti-spam solutions.

Makes you wonder how out of date the OS and other software are that they have installed on their servers and with that kind of lack of attention to details, those servers are doomed to be hacked, let alone bounce a few emails.

[blaze]

What I find pretty amusing is that the folks at ordb.org don't have the technical expertise to create a seperate sub domain that they can just remove the DNS entry for.

Makes you wonder about their ability to provide proper anti spam detection.

[incrediBILL]

Why would the folks at ordb.org continue to maintain a subdomain or DNS for a dead site?

As far as I can tell it's just gone, doesn't ping, nada, so how doesn't this reflect on their previous anti-spam detection abilities?

If the site was still active I would agree but not after being offline since Dec '06.

[Romeo]

After publicly announcing the deactivation of relays.ordb.org in December 2006(!), they apparently finally got tired to still see all that senseless DNS traffic load they still get at ordb.org, eating up their resources.

So all sloppy mail server admins will now learn it the hard way.

Kind regards,
R.