Re: Can someone from SORBS contact me offlist?

[Mark Foster <blakjak () blakjak net>]

On Sat, 11 Jul 2009, Seth Mattinen wrote:

> Nuno Vieira - nfsi wrote:
> > That's good to know.
> >
> > I'll avoid using it.
>
> Holy crap, what's with all the AHBL hate? At the very least they have a 
> responsive human and - last time I checked - they don't require an exchange 
> of money to get off the list. I'd hazard a guess that "two weeks" includes 
> the responsiveness of the other party. I unsuspended a domain yesterday 
> because the other party just now got around to the notices I sent 3 months 
> ago on their hacked content manager hosting phishing sites.
>
> People bitch and whine about free services more than when they actually pay 
> for something. Sad.

People who choose to run with SORBS - yes, a free service - take a 
significant risk (as other posters have highlighted); the people who run 
SORBS (person?) take a fairly extreme approach to the idea of removing 
hosts.... unfortunately the combination of blacklisting a host over a 
questionable report / reason, and then making removal of said host all-but 
impossible, would point toward a system that's far from 'user friendly', 
from the 'victim' point of view.

Ala it appears that there's no room for any view that disagrees with that 
which SORBS take.

But it is free. And one of the simplest implementations is a yes/no based 
on the RBL response... as opposed to simply perhaps using it for 
'scoring'.

I personally used one of the SORBS BL's several years ago on my personal 
MTA with good effect - primarily dropping inbound connections deemed to 
be from dynamic IP addresses.  Unfortunately after a while false positives started creeping in 
and the collatoral damage started accumulating.  I subsequently adopted 
other ways of dealing with inbound spam and can't say i've missed the crap 
that resulted from using them.

> From the other side of the coin - on a professional level I had cause to 
deal with Michael Sullivan on behalf of an ISP I worked for that had been 
listed.... again the totalitarian viewpoint taken by SORBS made 
negotiation all-but impossible, this caused us "customer service issues".

Most recently all i've been able to do is recommend people steer clear. 
That recommendation stands.  Spam filtering technology has evolved over 
the last few years and there's plenty of better ways....

... offers no solace to the victims of providers who are still running 
SORBS, however.

Mark.