SORBS Status: Shutting Down or For Sale

As reported on Spamtacular and on SORBS' website:

"ANNOUNCEMENT: Possible SORBS Closure... 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.

This announcement will be replicated on the main SORBS website at the earliest opportunity. [...] -- Michelle Sullivan (Previously known as Matthew Sullivan)"

(Note that the quote from SORBS ends above.) My recommendation at this time is to cease using the various SORBS DNSBLs until and unless stable hosting is obtained by the list operator. I've already noticed intermittent issues accessing the SORBS website, and if their hosting is in flux it's likely to impact their ability to maintain the master database online. The net result is that you could have timeouts, delaying inbound mail, or you could have false positive blocking issues where mirrors of SORBS are caching data no longer intended to be published by the list operator.

Note that my recommendations are aimed only at those already known to use SORBS. I've strongly recommended against using SORBS in the past, due to what I believe to be significant false positive issues. But, obviously, email administrators have the right to decide what mail they wish to accept, based on whatever criteria they wish to follow.

Status of dnsbl.net.au: Dead

The blacklist at dnsbl.net.au has announced it is winding down. As noted in a February 25, 2009 posting on its website, "Please note that as of Wednesday, April 1, 2009 the DNSBL.NET.AU blacklist will cease to exist."

As of this writing on April 29th, 2009, I do still see active entries when querying via DNS, but I assume that these are likely to go away soon. If you utilize this blacklist, I'd recommend removing it from your MTA or spam filter configuration.

Status of DSBL: Dead

The DNSBL called "DSBL" is no more. As of March 11, 209, their website reports: "DSBL is GONE and highly unlikely to return. Please remove it from your mail server configuration."

DSBL was an open relay/open proxy DNSBL. From the website: "DSBL relied on volunteers who, upon receiving spam, would test the IP addresses that sent them spam for open relay and open proxy vulnerabilities.

"The tests consisted of doing a straightforward open relay test on the sending IP address, as well as open proxy tests on a few well-known proxy ports (1080, 3128, etc), with the aim of relaying a test message to DSBL. Upon receipt of the test message, DSBL would add the IP address to its database."

A noble cause, if perhaps a bit of a manual process. Sad to see it go, though it does sound like perhaps its time has come and gone.

DSBL had DNSBL zone names of list.dsbl.org, unconfirmed.dsbl.org and multihop.dsbl.org.