I need to resolve some issues that we are having with you guys but there is
a lack of timelyness with your contact forms, 28 days is simply unacceptable
Sorbs was shut down just about that time ago ..
Ronald Cotoni wrote:
I need to resolve some issues that we are having with you guys but there is
a lack of timelyness with your contact forms, 28 days is simply unacceptable
You might also try on the spam-l.org mailing list.
~Seth
"It comes with great sadness that I have to announce the imminent
closure of SORBS. The University of Queensland have decided not to
honor their agreement with myself and SORBS and terminate the hosting
contract.
I have been involved with institutions such as Griffith University
trying to arrange alternative hosting for SORBS, but as of 12 noon,
22nd June 2009 no hosting has been acquired and therefore I have been
forced in to this announcement. SORBS is officially "For Sale" should
anyone wish to purchase it as a going concern, but failing that and
failing to find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane
area of Queensland Australia SORBS will be shutting down permanently
in 28 days, on 20th July 2009 at 12 noon."
uhm, I dont think they care to help...
-chris
[snip]
You might want to read the June 25th update they made to the
announcement, as shown on the very same page.
"
SORBS has had 2 offers of hosting within the Queensland/North New
South Wales area, one of which is by a top hosting company in
Australia.
The result is at this present time I, Michelle Sullivan, feel that
SORBS will not close on the date specified, though there maybe some
small outages around this time.
"
By all appearances SORBS is still completely operational, they have
not shutdown, and every indication now is that they are probably not
going to shut down.
SORBS has never had a good reputation over removals..........
Yes, they are really bad. It is actually quite silly that a blacklisting
service is that slow on responding to problems.
I find it unacceptable that people demand instant service from a company they don't have prior business arrangements/relationship with. Average turn around time for the AHBL is around two weeks if we don't have an established contact and procedure with.
How would you like it if a non-customer came to you demanding resolution to a problem with a free service you provide? Would you drop everything, and give that non-customer the same service you give a paying customer?
That's good to know.
I'll avoid using it.
--nvieira
I don't see any demands there. I see someone commenting on the utility of the "free service" offered.
If a blacklist, free or not, lists good IP addresses and takes a long time to remove them, then the blacklist is not useful.
Given that you said AHBL requires two weeks to remove good IP addresses unless there is an "established contact", I'll be sure never to use said list. Suppose my business partner gets listed? Am I to ruin our relationship for two weeks because you are busy or don't like the fact we don't pay you? We didn't pay you to list us either.
Besides, there are plenty of useful blacklists with very low FP rates who are responsive. Why use one that has high FP and is unresponsive?
Running a blacklist sucks. It's got to be one of the hardest jobs for a white-hat to do on the 'Net. But if you don't like it, don't do it. Doing it then complaining about it after is .. silly.
Hi Brielle.
Do they take two weeks to put a spammer on the list?
Regards,
John
John Souvestre - New Orleans LA
Sadly, this is for remote hosts. I have no idea why someone would use such
services as there are too many false positives. It is like using an IDS
that is 2 weeks behind on it's definition. That brings up the point of
false positives and outdated information blocking legitimate users, perhaps
many which is what my company is experiencing since they deem certain
reverse dns entries too "generic" and blacklisted a /18. I believe that is
why no one knows if they will be bought or whatnot. Who knows.
Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
Given that you said AHBL requires two weeks to remove good IP addresses unless there is an "established contact", I'll be sure never to use said list. Suppose my business partner gets listed? Am I to ruin our relationship for two weeks because you are busy or don't like the fact we don't pay you? We didn't pay you to list us either.
What he's describing isn't a business; it's a protection racket.
Running a blacklist sucks. It's got to be one of the hardest jobs for a white-hat to do on the 'Net. But if you don't like it, don't do it. Doing it then complaining about it after is .. silly.
Yep.
Mike
Yes, but the AHBL is actually a responsible blacklist service.
SORBS has policies which make me choose to not use it on my mailservers,
and the general amount of complaints I have heard about it is a major
turnoff.
Also, I believe SORBS are the ones that require a donation to get out if
you've been screwed by your upstream provider that just handed you a
tainted class-C. With the shortage of IPv4 addresses becoming more and
more imminent, such policy is simply unacceptable.
William
I wouldn't condone usage of SORBS' lists, because they sometimes use
robots to automatically list things that have little rational basis
for being listed, which causes problems. But it may be hard to
convince your mail recipients to avoid the same.
Commonly, providers may give un-assigned subnets generic PTR records
like "isp192-168-0-1.somedomain.com" over their IP space. SORBS
automatically lists these in the DUHL. And does not automatically
remove them later, when the reverse zone is populated with final
hostnames.
Legitimate mailservers that do not originate spam routinely appear in
the DUHL (and get blocked by users of the list).
How would you like it if a non-customer came to you demanding resolution to
a problem with a free service you provide? Would you drop everything, and
give that non-customer the same service you give a paying customer?
That depends on the service. The DNS root servers provide a free
service to internet users who aren't customers. If those servers all
started directing users' .COM, lookups to an incorrect TLD server,
so nothing resolved, people would be upset if $root_server_operator
told them to wait 2 weeks.
People who consume a blacklist might get that service for free, but
they only do it on reliance that the blacklist follows the policies
that the maintainer had published for their blacklist.
In other words, that they provide what they say they are providing,
and not something different. The expectation of timeliness arises,
because internet applications, services like the web and e-mail are
time-critical, no ability to send e-mail may mean lost revenue.
An improper blacklist entry (or even a proper one) does direct,
immediate, and serious damage to the party listed, and this injury
is caused directly by the actions of the blacklist provider
maintaining the list entry.
I would suggest blacklist services have a moral duty to take
reasonable measures to ensure they are not inflicting excessive,
easily avoidable damage on innocent third parties, with stale or
erroneous entries in their lists.
If people believed a blacklist did not take reasonable measures to
correct errors quickly, then it would be understandable that their
reputation suffers.
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.
~Seth
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.
"Proxy removal is functioning (sort of). Any other type of removal is no longer possible.
Do not contact us about removals."
That's quoted from their web site. No method of communications except through the proxy, which is only "sort of" working. So, if someone is listed, and the proxy only sort or works and can't remove them, there's no recourse.
Given that you said AHBL requires two weeks to remove good IP addresses
unless there is an "established contact", I'll be sure never to use said
list. Suppose my business partner gets listed? Am I to ruin our
relationship for two weeks because you are busy or don't like the fact
we don't pay you? We didn't pay you to list us either.
Actually, if its a simple issue with a proxy or trojan, if you use the removal tool, provided the IP comes back clean from our tester, you are removed within 12-24 hours.
If it requires manual intervention, yeah, its going to take longer. Our original idea was to base removal time on how long the listing was in the AHBL. If you hosted and gladly accepted money from a spam spewer for a year, and only decided to terminate them after they didn't pay, you'd be listed for somewhere in between 6 months to a year.
Those two weeks are our buffer for seeing if said spam source is really gone, or just shut off long enough to fool us. We've been lied to so many times, its hard to justify doing instant removals on request.
Further, there is such thing as a local whitelist of IP addresses.
Besides, there are plenty of useful blacklists with very low FP rates
who are responsive. Why use one that has high FP and is unresponsive?
*shrugs* Thats up to you. I never held a gun to your head telling you to use the AHBL.
Running a blacklist sucks. It's got to be one of the hardest jobs for a
white-hat to do on the 'Net. But if you don't like it, don't do it.
Doing it then complaining about it after is .. silly.
I'm not complaining. People talk shit about Michelle, and yes, I will get involved. She's a friend of mine, and a fellow DNSbl maintainer.
I knew I forgot to push the update that had the new contact form. Anyways, proxy removal works fine, and the contact form works.