Status of block.blars.org: DEAD

The “Blars” DNSBL (block.blars.org) appears to have gone on walkabout.

Created in 2002, the “Blars Block List” was an aggressive, semi-private blocking list run by a gentleman known to the greater internet community only by the pseudonym of “Blars.”

The "BlarsBL" had a broad criteria for listing. This included spam sending domains, open relays, sites with disagreeable spam reporting policies, sites lacking abuse addresses, those who host spammer dropboxes or websites, those who have threatened Blars or others with legal action, and sites originating break-in attempts and other exploits (open proxy, open relay, etc.).

The list has been criticized for implying that payment was required for removal. From the site: "If you would like a site be added or removed from BlarsBL, you may hire Blars at his normal consulting rates (currently $250/hour, 2 hour minimum, $1000 deposit due in advance for non-established customers) to investigate your evidence about the site. If it is found that the entry was a mistake, no charge will be made and the entire deposit will be refunded."

The list appears to be no more. The websites www.blars.org and block.blars.org both resolve to a “This domain is parked free with GoDaddy” placeholder page.

Note: I confirmed today that all lookups against block.blars.org DSNBL will result in a match. This is the “Osirusoft solution,” also known as “listing the whole world.” Intentional or not, this means that if you continue to use this blocking list, you will receive no incoming mail whatsoever. If you are using this list to reject mail, I recommend you cease doing so immediately. It will block all of your inbound mail. See this page at MXToolbox.com further confirmation of BLARS mysterious disappearance. This post from the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email indicates that it has likely been out of operation since approximately December 18, 2006.

Status of relays.ordb.org: DEAD

Created by Thomas Jensen in 2001, the Open Relay Database (ORDB) was one of the multitude of open relay spam blocking lists to come about in the wake of the legal troubles of Alan Brown and his New Zealand-based ORBS DNSBL.

The ORDB service ceased operation on December 18, 2006. The website was retired on December 31, 2006.

The website indicated that blocking open relays is no longer as effective as it once was.

"It's been a case of a long goodbye as very little work has gone into maintaining ORDB for a while. Our volunteer staff has been pre-occupied with other aspects of their lives. In addition, the general consensus within the team is that open relay RBLs are no longer the most effective way of preventing spam from entering your network as spammers have changed tactics in recent years, as have the anti-spam community.”

If you have checks against relays.ordb.org configured in your mail server or spam filtering software, please stop querying the list immediately. Use of the list will no longer block any unwanted spam, and the nameservers listed in the domain registration are likely overwhelmed with traffic. This is especially heightened due to the fact that the list was in wide, popular use, and also that it was so recently retired.

3/26/08 Update: ORDB has "listed the entire world" -- returning any query with a "listed" response. The result is that if you still have ORDB in your mail server config files, you're now blocking 100% of your inbound mail. For anyone still trying to "use" ORDB, you're not going to receive any inbound mail until you disable queries to it.

Status of opm.blitzed.org: DEAD

The primary project of the “Blitzed” group is the Blitzed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network.

They also operated a DNSBL zone called opm.blitzed.org. This was the Blitzed Open Proxy Monitor (OPM). This popular open proxy DNSBL was run in such a way as to not probe a remote server to determine its open proxy status unless the server was implicated in reports of abuse. It did not list open relays.

The Blitzed group seems to have suffered a database or server failure as of May, 2006. This email to the “OPM Announce” mailing list details the situation, and explains that the OPM list would not be resurrected.

The list is not active at this time.

Based on this information, I would recommend that you remove opm.blitzed.org from the list of DNSBLs being checked in your mail server. It will no longer block any spam, and the potential exists for unpredictable results to be returned. Additionally, you'll be generating unnecessary DNS query traffic to the Blitzed network.

Status of relays.visi.com: DEAD

The zone relays.visi.com was home to the VISI.com Relay Stop List (RSL). According to the site, “RSL was created by volunteers, VISI.com users who wanted a conservative open relay list to use to assist VISI.com's "nospam" server filters. We are happy to share it with others in the Internet community.”

Hosted by VISI.com, a strong regional internet service provider with thousands of clients, it was positioned as a free alternative to the MAPS RSS relay blocking list. (The MAPS lists were originally free, but were converted to a “paid access only” system in 2001.)

In 2003, the RSL suffered from a hardware failure that resulted in a loss of data, but the system was restored by August.

The RSL website was last known to have been active in 2004. I have it on pretty good authority that since then, the people behind the project have moved on to other things.

The list is not active at this time. It will not block any spam, and I recommend against including it in any DNSBL checks, as it generates unnecessary DNS traffic to VISI.com.

Status of relays.radparker.com: DEAD

The DNSBL relays.radparker.com is no longer valid. If you are using relays.radparker.com in a mail server or spam filtering product, please stop doing so immediately. It will not block any spam. No DNSBL has been available under this domain for years, and unexpected results may be returned.

It used to be the home to a list called the Radparker Relay Spam Stopper (RRSS). The RRSS was a list that I myself (Al Iverson) created in early 1999 to help mail server administrators reject mail from open relaying mail servers. Back then, open relays were the primary transmission vector for the worst-of-the-worst kinds of spam. I created the list primarily to offer an alternative to ORBS, an open relay blocking list run by Alan Brown out of New Zealand. (This ORBS was a sort of descendant of a previous ORBS, run in Canada by Alan Hodgson.) Alan (Brown) had a habit of getting into arguments with people who were listed, actively probing mail servers without permission, listing things that didn't actually qualify as an open relays, and so forth. I found it distasteful and unfriendly.

Major policy differences for my new alternative open-relay list included:

• A remote server was not tested for open relay unless a spam message was received.

• Public record was kept of the spam message, and test proving the site was an open relay.

• Anybody could request that any listing be removed, and it would be removed.
  

The net result was that ORBS ended up imploding under various legal challenges, and the RRSS ended up becoming the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) RSS, later a component of a commercial spam-filtering solution, provided as of late by MAPS' current owners, Trend Micro.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1999, the RRSS list grew in popularity. At its peak, we figured that it was protecting over 350,000 mailboxes from open relay spam, and was used by quite a few local and regional ISPs, including USWest/Qwest.

I created the list on my own, on my spare time. Back then, it was hosted by my employer, with their permission. This meant that the company would occasionally get a screaming goober phone call from somebody whose mail got blocked, who couldn't figure out how to resolve the issue, and was sure that there was some giant conspiracy in place to harass them. (I probably wasn't as polite to some of those folks as I should have been, either.) Eventually enough of those calls started coming in that I decided it wasn't very wise to continue hosting the RRSS from my office at work. That's when I started talking to MAPS. They offered to host the project for me under the MAPS umbrella, a partnership I entered into somewhere around August or September 1999. Eventually my volunteer work turned into a full time job working for MAPS, where I continued to manage and develop the RSS project, as well as working as an investigator for the MAPS RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) project.

I left MAPS in October, 2000.

The zone relays.radparker.com was emptied out sometime after the project was moved to the MAPS' servers in California. That was back sometime in 1999 or 2000. It's not been used to host a DNSBL since.

Interestingly, the RRSS data, process, and code was my own intellectual property that I brought with me to MAPS, and never had any sort of formal agreement to transfer ownership to them. When I later left, I decided my heart lay elsewhere and I never pursued any sort of plan to take the project back unto myself. My friend Gordon Fecyk, who created what became the MAPS DUL, found himself in a similar situation when he left MAPS in 2002. In his case, he attempt to continue with his DUL project. This resulted in him being sued by MAPS, having been accused of stealing MAPS' own intellectual policy-- a claim I suspect was distorted and probably unfounded, as did others.

MAPS founder Paul Vixie recently posted to a mailing list that the original, long-dead MAPS RBL zone of rbl.maps.vix.com is still receiving may queries against it. This got me to thinking – I did a bit of Google searching myself and found that there are still some people out there wondering if the RRSS zone of relays.radparker.com is working. So, here I am, posting this information, in the hope that the next time somebody's wondering, they'll query Google for more information, and find this page with the definitive answer: Nope, there is no DNSBL to be found at relays.radparker.com.