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...
Late last year we wrote about the many problems with SORBS. One of the results of that series of posts was a discussion between a lot of industry professionals and GFI executives. A number of problems were identified with SORBS, some that we didn’t mention on the blog. There was an open and free discussion about solutions. A few months ago, there were a bunch of rumors that GFI had divested...
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.
All work and no cat petting makes for a very cranky, and in the way, cat.
Return Path has turned our recent series of blog posts about SORBS into a handy list for what people SHOULD do when they’re intending to run a blocklist. More regular posting will return next week.
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 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. Today I’m looking at how this information should affect...
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 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:...
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links In the last few days we’ve talked about GFI’s lack of responsiveness, the poor quality of their reputation and blacklist data, and the interesting details of their DDoS claims. Today we’re going to look at (some of) the fundamental problems with GFI’s procedures and...
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links I’ve been stage-managing for a production of The Nutcracker this week, so musical terminology is on my mind. In opera, the intermezzo is a comedic interlude between acts of an opera series. This comedic interlude is about the “DDoS” – a distributed denial of service...
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 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...
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links A little over a year ago the SORBS blacklist was purchased by GFI Software. I had fairly high hopes that it would improve significantly, start behaving with some level of professionalism and competence and become a useful data source, in much the same way that the SpamCop blacklist turned...
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