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ORDB.org Announces Shut Down

ORDB.org (Open Relay Database) has been fighting open relays and spam for more than five and half years. They have now announced of shutting down their services of 'RBL DNS' and 'mailing lists' on December 18, 2006. 'ORDB' has been maintaining a database of IP addresses of 'open SMTP relays' from where 'sysadmins' could block e-mail. They will also bring down their website by December 31, 2006.

The shut down of 'ORDB' is going to be for a much-extended period. One of the reasons is rather general that the organization's volunteer staff has got engaged with other things in life. Another reason is that the team believes in consensus that "open relay RBLs' can no longer effectively prevent spam from entering networks, as spamming techniques have changed, as also that of the anti-spam community.

Applauding 'ORDB', Steve Linford of anti-spam organization 'Spamhaus' says, it did a commendable job by successfully ending the 'open relay problem'. Open relay was functioning till a few years ago and was the principal method of sending spam. With the efforts of 'ORDB', currently there are very few open relays on the Net; as a result spammers no longer rely on open relays.

Any user still employing 'ORDB' needs to uninstall 'relys.ordb.org' from their 'mail server configurations'. Also an alternative 'open relays' list is not necessary as the related problem is no longer present in any serious form.

Presently, spammers relay most spam through 'hijacked proxies' by about 90 percent. 'Hijacked proxies' imply to Trojan and virus infected PCs through which spammers send out spam. The other 10 percent spam goes out directly from servers that spammers operate from their own domains. To stop relay of spam from these two sources, company networks use the 'Spamhaus XBL' (hijacked proxies) and the 'Spamhaus SBL' (direct spam source).

In the opinion of Alex Eckelberry of anti-spyware company 'Sunbelt', 'open relay RBLs' were useful long back; even then they caused 'false positives'. Right now they are useless.

The ORDBers recommend a combined use of 'dspam project', 'bmf', or 'Spam assassin' to keep networks free of spam in future.

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