1) There is not a 1:1 relationship between open relays and spam
2) Most open relays will never have any spam touch them
3) Systems such as "ORBL" punish mostly non-spammers, and are abusive
about the way they go about their probing and listing. They don't
make a decent effort to inform server owners of an impending
blacklist entry, and if they follow in the footsteps of their
predecessor (ORBS) they would actually act as a spam PROMOTER
because they would PUBLISH lists of spam-relays which makes it
even more trivial for spammers to abuse those hosts. (ORBL's
predecessor ORBS, in large part due to such obnoxious tactics,
has been hounded off the net twice now)
4) Huge amounts of non-spam email are blocked or lost as a result
of systems such as ORBL's. As you can see already, perfectly
legitimate email from list users has already been blocked on
this list.
5) If your intent is to address the spam problem, I suggest using
one of the MAPS/RBL lists (or something more sophisticated),
not the ORBL one. MAPS at least tries to make a good-faith
effort to contact mail admins before blackholing their SMTP
servers.
6) I don't know the current status, but I don't see any reason to
allow posting to the list by non-members.
On 28 Jul 2001, at 20:38, Douglas J. Hunley boldly uttered:
> Seems some people are having issues posting to the list lately. Their mail is
> being rejected. For those who didn't bother to read the reject, or cant make
> sense of what it is saying, read on.. everyone else, feel free to delete this
> message.
>
> linux.nf and hunley.homeip.net both use http://or.orbl.org as a DNS
> blacklisting site for incoming mail. I hate to use this feature cause I do
> realize that it is not 100%, however the amount of spam that hits the domains
> on my machines necessitate it.
>
> here's how it works. A user on 65.24.128.219 sends mail to linux.nf. the
> sendmail daemon on linux.nf sees the mail coming from this machine, initiates
> a dns lookup to 219.128.24.65.or.orbl.org. That lookup either indicates that
> 65.24.128.219 is listed as on open mail relay or is not. If it is listed, the
> sendmail daemon issues a 550 error stating that email from 65.24.128.219 is
> blocked and dumps the incoming mail into /dev/null. If it is not lsted, then
> the mail is accepted and everyone is happy.
>
> If you find that you are getting these rejection messages, READ the message.
> Write down what machine was rejected and contact your admin. Tell them that
> the machine in question is listed as an open relay and they need to go to
> http://or.orbl.org and follow the directions therein to have their site
> removed from the blacklist. If they refuse, I suggest you find another
> provider... there is really no excuse for running open relays.
>
> Thanks and sorry about the inconvenience and hassle; however, I do feel it is
> worth it.
> --
> Douglas J. Hunley ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Linux User #174778
> Admin: http://hunley.homeip.net/ Admin: http://linux.nf/
> Brainbench Linux Administration Certified
--
Philip J. Koenig [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium
_______________________________________________
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