Reminder: AHBL is Shutting Down

As previously reported, the AHBL DNSBL has been shut down.

Please note that the publisher of the AHBL DNSBL has indicated that she will set all of the DNS zones to "wildcard" status as of January 1st. This means that AHBL will be effectively "listing the world;" any site still using any of the AHBL DNSBL zones will reject all inbound mail until the AHBL DNSBL zones are removed from that mail server's configuration.

Brielle Bruns posted the following to the SDLU mailing list on 12/26/14: "Figured I'd give one last notice that I'm about to wildcard all of the public AHBL zones on Jan 1st, 2015.

"If you are still using them in your mail servers, or know someone who is, now would be a good time to remove them.  Most of the major packages that came with configuration options for using the AHBL have long since removed them (such as SpamAssassin), but there are still many many people out there who make no effort to maintain their services and/or don't upgrade/check configurations.

The private zones which some people know of and have access to will not be affected by this wildcarding, as they are still considered 'active' and 'maintained'."

Status of rbl.orbitrbl.com: DEAD

Today, Mark E. Jeftovic of EasyDNS warned readers of the Mailop list that it is unwise to use the DNSBL "rbl.orbitrbl.com" due to a combination of abandonment and administrative issues.

He writes: "As some of you may know, we recently took over ZoneEdit.com and it's customer base.

We've found a domain on the system: rbl.orbitrbl.com which is delegated to zoneedit nameservers, broken (it is not allowed to zone transfer from it's designated master), unresponsive (account owner is not answering email, has an address in Sri Lanka and no telephone number), is using excessive queries (~ >500M queries per day on a "free dns" domain) and attracting repeated, multiple DDoS attacks.

As such, we will be wildcarding this zone and setting a long TTL fairly soon.

If you're actually using this RBL in your MTAs, now's a good time to stop. (this RBL is broken on 5 out of it's 6 delegated nameservers across 3 separate providers)."