ORBS sucked into a black hole!

[Bill Stewart]

At 09:17 AM 06/12/2001 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 07:10:34AM -0500, measl at mfn.org wrote:
> > On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> >
> > > ORBS/MAPS/etc. "participate" by connecting to and reviewing sites,
> > > much like I go out to and watch movies to review.
> >
> > Not always.  If you refused to have your site "reviewed", then they would
> > literally make one up.
>
>Huh? If they're checking to see if you're running an open relay or
>harboring spammers, both can be verified ("reviewed") without too much effort.

ORBS's relay hunter software was often extremely aggressive,
pounding heavily on systems trying to see if it could send test spam.
Some ISPs and systems disliked that kind of rudeness and blocked them,
and that was enough to get you blacklisted.
At one point, MAPS was blocking ORBS, so MAPS users all blocked ORBS
         (Mommy, mommy, he's on MY side of the room!  Make him stop!)
so you didn't even have to be trying to block them to get blacklisted.

Also, harboring spammers can be much harder to verify -
some places let them operate out in the open,
while some expected their spammers to be stealthier,
and it's hard to tell a stealthy tolerated customer
from a stealthy not-caught-yet policy-violating customer,
especially from an ISP who's mostly in the colocation business
so the spammer may be a customer of a customer or
a customer of a customer of a customer.
Plus colocation or hosting customers may leave open relays
out of ignorance, or by mistake,
or because they don't have a good technical alternative,
and their ISPs may get crap from ORBS.

And that doesn't even count ISPs who have strong and enforced
anti-spamming policies but have occasional sales people who
are clueless about spam and willing to write contracts allowing violations -
my employer got embarassed by that a year or so
and the VP had to yell at everybody to make sure it doesn't happen again :-)

MAPS wasn't always the most flexibly-responding system,
but at least you could negotiate with them.


Also, spamming is active misbehaviour, while open relays aren't -
they're just something that's too easily abused, and closing them
reduces the tools available to spammers.
It's too bad - it was much easier for me to send email from my laptop
when I could use the same mail relay regardless of whether I was
connected to the LAN at work or dialed into my ISP,
because "att.com" would forward my mail either way.
(Then when that got closed, "research.att.com" would...)
Now I have to switch mail servers depending on where I am.