Re: ORBS ?

[Esa Laitinen <]

On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Nick Hilliard wrote:

> Indeed.  Some of our mail servers were put into this list for the sin of
> having customers with open relays who sent their outgoing mail through our
> servers.
> 
> I am not convinced that such blind vigilantism is going to do the anti-spam
> movement good in the long run, either :-(

Everybody is free to choose whether they use a blacklist or not. We use 
MAPS RBL, but I think ORBS has its merits.

Before a server appears in MAPS people have tried a lot to get things 
straight, so this takes a lot time and doesn't easily stop spamrun in 
progress. Also RBL has political aspects, ie. systems appearing in RBL 
don't necessarily have open smtp relays but they condone/promote spamming.

OTOH ORBS is based purely on technical things: if your system is an open 
relay, then it is blocked. If you close the hole, you get of the list. It 
is as simple as that. And now they're even telling that your system is in 
the list it is even better. 

Your systems, Nick, apparently forward messages from your clients 
systems, which has open relays. They apparently use your systems as smart 
hosts. If dorkslayers wanted to stop mail coming from your customers smtp 
hosts, how else could they do that than block your smtp servers? They  do 
give you (nowadays) one week notice to get your customers into shape.

So, these blacklists are different, and both have their merits. The 
reason we use RBL and not ORBS is the amount of open smtp servers, it is 
horrendous. If we used ORBS, we'd loose a lot of our connectivity. I'm 
very tempted, though. And every organization is free to choose which one, 
if any, they want to  use.


Esa Laitinen  	             If I cannot reply to your news or mail
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