On Thu, Jul 19, 2001 at 10:22:02AM -0400, Kurth Bemis wrote: > does any one know why orbs is offline? It appears to be because of a) legal troubles and b) the fact that Alan Brown has sold his ISP business. It is highly unlikely at this point that it will ever come back. It has been down, by the way, since early June. If you are still running rblsmtpd querying any of the ORBS lists, be warned: - The lists are no longer being maintained. The information in those list is *fast* becoming outdated; as time passes, you will be rejecting mail from more and more hosts that are not open relays. - The volunteers who provided DNS service to orbs.org are now seeing a significant increase in bandwidth usage because of the way the orbs lists were shut down. One of them has already turned to answering *every* ORBS request with an A and TXT record; this will lead to loss of _at least_ 1/10th of the mail at hosts still using ORBS. It is possible that others will start doing the same; in which case you will lose even more mail. Stop querying the ORBS lists; you're just wasting your own and others' resources. And if you switch to one of the other DNSBL's, please make sure you keep up with the various anti-spam forums. Most of these services are provided for free; making sure you don't waste the resources is the least you can do. Vince.