SORBS – back soon

If you’ve tried to get an address delisted from SORBS this week you’ll have found that their site is degraded, and there’s no way to request delisting.
They’ve been dealing with some very nasty database / hardware problems and while they’re fixing those the externally visible SORBS services are running in a read-only mode (where the list is published, but IP addresses can’t be added or removed).
The migration to new infrastructure is going well, and unless something unexpected happens I’d guess they’ll be running normally some time tomorrow.

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SORBS Progress

A little bird tells me that GFI have resolved their primary blocking issue on SORBS problems. If all goes well I’d expect their infrastructure and policies to improve significantly over the next few months. We’ll wait and see whether the data quality begins to improve after that.

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GFI/SORBS – I'm blacklisted, now what?

Act 1Act 2IntermezzoAct 3Act 4Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
In the past week we’ve demonstrated that the SORBS reputation data is riddled with mistakes, poor practices, security holes and operational problems, and that the quality of the end result is really too poor to be useful.
What does this mean to you though? There are really two aspects: 1. what to do if you’re blacklisted or blocked by GFI or based on GFI/SORBS data and 2. how this information should affect your choice of spam filtering technology. We’ll be looking at the first point today, and the second tomorrow.

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GFI/SORBS considered harmful, part 2

Act 1Act 2IntermezzoAct 3Act 4Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
Yesterday I talked about GFI responsiveness to queries and delisting requests about SORBS listings. Today I’m going to look at data accuracy.
The two issues are tightly intertwined – a blacklist that isn’t responsive to reports of false positive listings will end up with a lot of stale or inaccurate data, and a blacklist that has many false positives will likely be overwhelmed with complaints and delisting requests, and won’t be able to respond to them – leading to a spiral of dissatisfaction and inaccurate data feeding off each other.

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