I can’t say I’m unhappy to see this or i’ll miss it when it’s gone. An arbitrary definition of “spam” is not so good; providing almost no information to administrators and end users is just plain poor and demanding a “donation” for removal is just plain bovine excrement.
Something I learned from my formative years as a neophyte mail admin-in-training on news.admin.net-abuse.email was that if you wanted to run a blacklist and be taken seriously, you need a fair deal of transparency (ie provide info on why/how a server got listed and a means to resolve the issue) and fairly sane and personable demeanour, and a clear and stricly enforced policy on listing.
Unfortunately SORBS failed all of these in my experience.
One of my old jobs was to handle abuse@ at a Large Australian Hosting Provider (now part of MelbourneIT) along with my regular systems admin / support duties.
Alas, as unfortunately happens in large network / hosting ops, a customer spews some junk. We found and terminated the perp, but not before getting blacklisted.
A quick check of the major lists found the evidence / reason for listing and after informing them that we’d resolved the issue removal was quite swift.
But not SORBS. After jumping through a couple of hoops to find out how / when the servers got listed, no evidence for it’s addition was found aside a single “Recieved:” email header – which is easily forged (and at the time quite popular with spammers to confuse less experienced users/admins)
Our request for more information was met with little more than “I have proof, but I’m not sharing any more” and removal was met with “Donate to the fund supporting Mr Anti-Spammer, who’s being sued for defamation by WeSpamYou Pty. Ltd and I’ll remove it” (names spared to protect the innocent).
W.T.F? Of course the answer was “no” (with the backing of management) especially after I pointed out the case had been settled, in the anti-spammer’s favour. This was changed to a “donate to $charity” after I reminded Mr/Ms Sullivan of that fact.
It still didn’t act as a deterrent (even Legal pointing out that it’s potentially extortion didn’t work!) so I just gave up and stopped bothering with him. You know what they say about arguing with an idiot – they bring you to their level and beat you with experience.
Henceforth, I’ve been advising mail administrators not to use SORBS zones. Customers getting bounces mentioning SORBS got a boilerplate response outlining the situation and why using opaque and arbitrary lists are a Bad Thing (worded appropriately for on-forwarding to ISPs as applicable). I don’t recall ever getting one complaint, as most of the major ISPs here didn’t use it to block mail anyway and smaller players generally got the message once made aware.
There are far better alternatives that don’t generate so many false positives, catch more genuine spam and don’t shake down mail admins / abuse guys for removal. I personally use zen.spamhaus.org for my DNS blacklist needs and it’s never let me down in over 6 years (tied into a multitude of Postfix and Exim installs for small and large mail providers alike)
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