SORBS - Is There a Better Spam Blacklist?

rootnl asks: "Recently I decided to upgrade my email server with better spam detection and decided to use the SORBS blacklist. It is a very aggressive blacklist and could be deemed quite effective. However, I discovered two totally legal servers currently being blocked by their Spam 'o Matic service: a Google Gmail server (64.233.182.185), and another server belonging to an ISP called Orange (193.252.22.249). Now, normally one would think these providers would probably get themselves de-listed, but the process provided revolves around donating money. As I just happen to have a friend that is using the said ISP, I have to seriously reconsider using SORBS. What is your experience with SORBS? If you have alternatives, what would you suggest as a better blacklist service?"

Dunno about better

[melonman (608440)]

But avoid SPEWS like the plague. They have a wonderful policy of blacklisting entire 16-bit IP ranges because one machine in an enormous server park has been used to send spam.

They know this causes massive collateral damage to machines administrated by totally independent companies, many of them small and liable to suffer severe hardship because of this arbitrary action. That's precisely the idea: they keep hurting non-spammers to make them lobby the server parks to deal with the spammers.

Unless you think that kidnapping children and refusing to return them unless their parents fight the mafia for you is an ethical law-enforcement policy, SPEWS is obviously far far worse than the problem they are allegedly attempting to solve.

Re:Dunno about better

[Brightest Light (552357)]

What exactly is an RBL operator supposed to do about large server parks that simply do not give a shit about the spammers residing on their network? What do you do about networks that actively aid spammers by moving them around and around to clean IP space as they're blacklisted? Playing IP whack-a-spammer went out of fashion years ago, and obviously asking politely doesn't work. Yeah, finding your ISP listed on SPEWS sucks, because there's no real way to contact them; though you can beg in NANAE and NANABL for the entertainment of the wannabe 'spam-fighters' till you're blue in the face -- but if your ISP does not care about the fact that one of their customers is stealing bandwidth, CPU cycles, and time from other people and their ISPs, what else can SPEWS do about it? My understanding of the SPEWS escalation process is that they notify the ISP about the spammer on their network, and then if nothing is done, they list the surrounding IP blocks in an ever-increasing fashion. Meaning if the ISP simply does not care that there's a spammer on their network, they are made to care by virtue of their entire netspace being (eventually) listed. What else *can* an RBL operator do when the ISP does not listen or care? I ask this as a serious question. IANASFBFNANAE (I am not a SPEWS fan boy from NANAE) - in fact, I don't directly use RBLs any longer.

Re:

[Scarblac (122480)]

What they can do is list the IPs from which spam has originated. Period. That's what they're supposed to do.

Re:

[Pig Hogger (10379)]

What they can do is list the IPs from which spam has originated. Period.

And you will have as much spam as before.

Spam-friendly ISPs will regularly give different Ip addresses to spammers.

SPEWS stands for SPam Early Warning System. That is, it BLOCKS spam BEFORE it leaves the network, in anticipation of the ritual spammer IP address change. And that can only be achieved by listing the whole IP range of the spam-friendly ISP.

Re:

[Ed Avis (5917)]

It's not the RBL's job to fight spam, only to give an honest estimation of how likely a particular IP address is to be a spammer. People can then use this to configure their mail system to filter out most spam and let through most legitimate mail.

If SPEWS feel the need to punish ISPs for their behaviour, they need two classes of blacklist: one that says 'this address sends spam', and one that says 'this address probably isn't a spammer, but it belongs to a Bad Network'. Then let users choose for themselve

Re:

[mvdwege (243851)]

If SPEWS feel the need to punish ISPs for their behaviour, they need two classes of blacklist: [...]

People would take you a lot more seriously if you would do your homework before making bold statements.

Hint: try reading the SPEWS FAQ and looking at the database before spouting off.

Mart

Re:Dunno about better

[Lost Race (681080)]

SPEWS is probably not relevant any more. There have been no changes to the published DNSBL zones since 2006-08-24; apparently the database is no longer being maintained.

Re:

[fractalus (322043)]

What's you're supposed to do is suck it up and take it like a man.

Let me explain. You have to decide what it is you're trying to accomplish as a blacklist operator. Are you trying to advise people of spam sources? Or are you trying to punish spammers and their friends?

If you're just trying to advise people of spam sources, so that they can choose not to receive mail from spammers, then do just that. List spam sources, and stop there. Mission accomplished, although spammers will move around and you'll have t

Re:

[meringuoid (568297)]

The error in your reasoning starts when you assume that self-appointed do-gooders have the right to infringe the rights of third parties.

Is it the right of the owner of a mail server freely to accept or refuse messages at will? Is it his right to define whatever rules he wishes for the acceptance or rejection of email? Is there anybody in the world who has the right to order him to do otherwise?

If the answers are 'yes', 'yes' and 'no' respectively, I submit to you that it is those who would silence SORB

Re:

[epine (68316)]

The error in your reasoning starts when you assume that self-appointed do-gooders have the right to infringe the rights of third parties. (I'm not going to answer any posts about how actually it's just a list and no-one has to use it bla bla - save it for the bar-room barristers.)

You have some gall beginning your post with an analysis of the error in other people's logic while predicating your argument on rights that don't exist and then insisting that if anyone points this out you'll stick your fingers in

Re:

[geminidomino (614729)]

Indeed. It's pedantry. And a rather cowardly refusal to accept responsibility for their actions. If I had a blocking list, then I'd say with pride that I block spam, and some list maintainers do this.

You mean like Joe Jared [oretek.com], or maybe the NANAE Nine? [pcworld.com]

Lawyers are the only creatures on the planet with less scruples than spammers. Prudence does not necessarily equal cowardice.

Re:

[scdeimos (632778)]

And the slight lack of logic of blocking email from addresses that only host websites.

Whilst I have no experience with SPEWS, I have worked with ISP's and webhosting providers in the past. Blocking IP's that "only host websites" makes perfect sense when those web sites host brain dead form-to-mail scripts/executables (ie: sender and recipient addresses can be supplied as form parameters) - it's as good as advertising free SPAM zombies.

Re:

[Pig Hogger (10379)]

But avoid SPEWS like the plague. They have a wonderful policy of blacklisting entire 16-bit IP ranges because one machine in an enormous server park has been used to send spam.
They know this causes massive collateral damage to machines administrated by totally independent companies, many of them small and liable to suffer severe hardship because of this arbitrary action. That's precisely the idea: they keep hurting non-spammers to make them lobby the server parks to deal with the spammers.

Bullshit. SPE

SURBL

[tootired (91527)]

SURBL is a URL blacklist.

Employing it enables your spam software to block emails that have matching blocked urls in the message body.

I have not gotten any false positives with it and it blocks a ton of nasty phishing stuff in addition to the usual SpermaMAXX crap.

Expect many false positives

[dtfinch (661405)]

All the blacklists I know have a tendency to block entire ISPs rather than just the ranges known to generate spam, if they think the ISP isn't taking sufficient action against its spammers or spambot infected customers.
Blacklists and whitelists are useful, but I wouldn't use them as the sole indicator of whether or not an email is spam.

Re:

[dtfinch (661405)]

Pretend I said "blacklist" instead of "block", since the lists don't do the blocking.

Re:

[mutterc (828335)]

Spamhaus claims to not do this... the only time they list IPs that are not spam sources are pre-emptively when a spammer on their ROKSO list gets an account, and sometimes ISP's corporate mail servers (not the customers' ones, and not customer machines).

SORBS should be shut down.

[finchwizard (889672)]

I'm sorry but SORBS should be shut down. The amount of time I myself and many colleagues have managed to get onto SOBS because we were classed as a dynamic IP range, despite having blocks of IP's and it's extremely hard to get off it. I understand blocking people with Open relay servers, but being in a dynamic range, which can mean IP's being assigned to you from your ISP is a joke. Everyone should be boycotting these guys, two of the large ISP's in Australia use these guys to filter out spam, and are being blocked by small business's and Education. I've never posted comments on Slashdot yet, but this is one I feel very strongly on, and SORBS should be avoided at all costs. If they deem you a Spammer, despite proving to them you are not, they still reserve the right to keep you on the list and completely screw over your business.

Re:

[CowboyBob500 (580695)]

I use SORBS precisely because they block dynamic IP ranges. 99% of spam comes from trojaned machines on dynamic IPs and I find this extremely effective at blocking spam. If your mailserver lives on a dynamically assigned IP then that is your problem. In my opinion a mail server should ALWAYS be on a static IP - I view it as a sign of a trusted mail server. If your ISP can't provide this, then you need to change your ISP. I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no sympathy in this situation. There is no reason for

Re:SORBS should be shut down.

[finchwizard (889672)]

All 30 IP's I rent are Static, and that has never changed over the years I've owned them, my servers are also running Linux and are very secure with both Spamassassin and ClamAV scanning, as well as blocking certain mimetypes. So don't give me dynamic IP range stuff, I was lucky that my ISP managed to straighten them out, but I've had friends that aren't as lucky. Of course SORBS is going to block a high rate of spam, it's also blocking a lot of legitimate people, and the fact they are extorting people to get off the list is ludacris.

Sorry, but you are wrong, SORBS is untrustworthy.

[Dion (10186)]

Well, I have a number of servers on static IPs that SORBS think are dynamic.

I have tried telling the idiots that they are wrong, but to no avail.

It's really a problem that people trust such a bunch of retards, because it's hard for the administrators of the mail servers to know if important mail is being blocked, very hard for users to know and even more impossible for users to smack some sense into the the head of the fool who runs their mail server.

What I have done in stead of using the static and poorl

Re:

[geminidomino (614729)]

AFAIK SORBS really has no way of knowing for sure unless they have detailed information on an ISP's IP addressing layout and policy.

That's what rDNS is for. If it's not working, they should contact their isp.

Re:

[c_g_hills (110430)]

SORBS does not block anybody. It is simply a tool used by postmasters to make decisions about what messages they wish to accept.

Re:

[tacocat (527354)]

I agree with this assessment. SORBS is one of those spam fanatical groups that should be convinced they need a regime change. They are way too aggressive.

One RBL list that I was using briefly because of false positives still had an interesting approach. They blocked anyone who was reported as delivering spam for 45 minutes and then removed from the list. Problem for me what they blocked my mailing lists that I subscribe too.

They should never report mailing lists as sending spam. The mailing lists are

Orange = Wanadoo

[grahamm (8844)]

Orange is part of Wanadoo who are known to be both spam friendly and to host spamvertised web sites. So maybe listing Orange is not such a bad idea.

Re:

[Ksempac (934247)]

First Wanadoo doesnt exist anymore. Second Orange has never been part of Wanadoo. Wanadoo was the ISP branch of France Telecom (the main phone company in France), who bought the British mobile phone company Orange. Then they decided to merge all their mobile phones/ISP services in Europe (including Wanadoo and Orange, but also many others) into one single company called Orange [wikipedia.org]. Third, before saying some company is spam friendly, you should get some reliable source.

But pretty much EVERY ISP is spam-friendly

[Anonymous Brave Guy (457657)]

The problem with this argument is, as usual, collateral damage. While there may be a spammer using Wanadoo somewhere, there are also many legitimate users who will be caught in the blast radius.

Before anyone replies with the usual holier-than-thou "Well they should change their ISP then", please consider that this is not trivial for a lot of people. Moreover -- and here's the real kicker -- pretty much every ISP is "spam-friendly" because, as the recent spam wave has demonstrated all too clearly, pretty m

it's not the providers job to delist themself

[tolonuga (10369)]

if you run a anti spam filter, it is your job to make sure your data is accurate.
but if you think your users would pressure some admin so they get back to you,
that is keeping mails hostage and not an acceptable practice.

if you do that, it is not part of the solution, it is part of the problem.

Use spam assassin with more that one RBL

[simm1701 (835424)]

I prefer to use spam assassin and use a couple of RBLs with various weightings on each.

I keep the weightings quite low since I find most of the RBLs too agressive - added to the bayes and other checks however it is quite good at pushing spam into the right destination (and for the very spammy thats /dev/null)

True this means I actually have to receive and process the mail rather than just arbitarily ignoring connections, but my mail server doesn't really get that much traffic as its only personal use.

Re:Use spam assassin with more that one RBL

[Zocalo (252965)]

To extend on that I also have a META rule set up to handle DNSBLs in SpamAssassin that adds some additional points based on how many RBLs each IP address has hit. A server on one DNSBL may be a false positive or an over aggressive listing, but if it's on three or four then it's almost certainly spam and gets an extra couple of points towards being classed as spam. If it matches five or more, then it gets an instant +50 file in the mailbox "/dev/null" score.

Freedom2Surf

[Phil John (576633)]

They're currently allegedly trying to extort money from a UK ISP Freedom2Surf (sadly now part of the Pipex group).

By default SORBS apparently block all dynamic IP's. For some strange reason they've deemed that 8192 IP's that are actually in the F2S static range are dynamic because the reverse DNS includes the IP address.

I've heard that they want $50 per IP to unblock them. They wont even talk to users who have static IP address in that range to get the block lifted.

Answered by editor

[dtfinch (661405)]

"from the blacklists-in-general-are-like-this dept."
That about sums it up.

SORBS should be avoided at all costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Several reasons why:
Large netblocks will be repeatedly put onto one of their lists if they dont comply with the founder/main admin's idea of how reverse dns should be configured. They will list IP blocks that dont conform to an RFC that funnily enough, he wrote.

Getting in contact with them in any reasonable timeframe is damn near impossible in any timely manner.
Primary/Secondary SMTP servers of ISP's will often by listed as part of their blanket block approach.

They continually block whole IP ranges that are statically assigned, often automatically with seemingly no human oversight. There can be found many complaints on assorted web forums across the net, especially australian, full of people trying to figure out why they were listed on one of the sorbs lists, and how to be removed.

Almost all of the issues i have run into with SORBS dont seem to have anything to do with eliminating spam, more to do with pushing the founders RFC for reverse lookups. Comply, and you are free from hassle forever. Fail to comply, and face loosing SMTP access to any providers using SORBS for anythere from a day to over a week.

Re:

[Pig Hogger (10379)]

Large netblocks will be repeatedly put onto one of their lists if they dont comply with the founder/main admin's idea of how reverse dns should be configured. They will list IP blocks that dont conform to an RFC that funnily enough, he wrote.

If it's in an RFC, it's the law.

SORBS!!! I'd like to ABsorb the so-and-so's!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a fixed IP address provided by my ISP. I run my own servers and have done for nearly 10 years. My servers are not now, and have never been Open Relay. I have run every possible test to make sure that is the case. SORBS, in their infinite wisdom, deem my address to be dynamic because it is part of a permanently leased dynamic range, so they block me, and therefore I cannot send email to anyone using two of the major ISP's in Australia. I have emailed sorbs and asked them to check my server. No response. I have spoken to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman in Australia, who tell me they can't do anything, that I should talk to "The Australian Communications and Media Authority", but if you are to check the SORBS site it specifically mentions that "The Australian Communications and Media Authority" have no influence over them at all. I have threatened SORBS with legal action. No response. Basically, they don't care less that I can't send email to the majority of Australia's internet users, because I won't donate money to them.

If you visit their site their tag line says "Fighting spam by finding and listing Exploitable Servers." This really should read "Exploiting small businesses through a cash for delisting scam".

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I've been told that the two major Australian ISP's who use SORBS just happen to form part of the "group of companies as a private venture" that make up SORBS. Interesting huh?

Re:

[Pig Hogger (10379)]

so they block me, and therefore I cannot send email to anyone using two of the major ISP's in Australia. I have emailed sorbs and asked them to check my server.

You're shooting at the wrong duck. You're not being blocked by SORBS, but by the "two major ISPs in Australia". Your beef is with them, not SORBS.

SpamHaus, SPEWS and SpamCop

[christophe.vg (742168)]

For a few years now, I'm using three RBL's to filter the incoming mails on our mail server, which hosts a few small-sized customers and some personal domains. The RBL's I use are: SpamHaus, SPEWS and SpamCop. We have set them up in sequence, so that a mail caught by one is not passed to the following anymore.

Looking at two days ...

01/01/07
total mails processed : 1432
considered non-spam : 719 (50.21%)
total number of blocks : 713 (49.79%)
spamhaus : 630 (88.36%)
spews : 2 ( 0.28%)
spamcop : 81 (11.36%)

01/01/06
total mails processed : 381
considered non-spam : 155 (40.68%)
total number of blocks : 226 (59.32%)
spamhaus : 191 (84.51%)
spews : 31 (13.72%)
spamcop : 4 ( 1.77%)

... it shows the trend I've seen over this time: SpamHaus does a great job for me and we haven't received any complaints from the customers concerning people not able to contact them.

Given these (poor-man's statistics) it seems that SPEWS is of little use to us. SpamHaus catches most of the problems. Maybe even if we switched SPEWS' and SpamCop's order, we might see that the latter would be able to catch those mails now caught by the former. It's surely something we're going to try.

On the other hand, it might very well be that SPEWS would catch also all SPAM caught by SpamHaus. Reversing the current order might be a nice test before we come to any real conclusions on which RBL to drop ;-)

The (current) bottom line: For us, SPEWS isn't causing any problems, but also doesn't help us that much. SpamHaus seems to be a great RBL source and SpamCop seems to be a nice addition.

But it doesn't stop all SPAM.

I would suggest staying away from it

[arivanov (12034)]

Sorbs blacklists nearly all ISP relays which force their customers to send through them or do transparent SMTP proxying. On the positive side this means that you are not going to get those 1-2 per day annoying Spanish or Dutch lotto scams from orange/freeserve webmail. On the negative side this means that you are not going to get mails from small law abiding businesses like recruitment agencies and such. They also blacklist nearly all lesser webmails.

I tried it for 2 weeks around the time when SpamHaus futu

SORBS?

[sigmoid_balance (777560)]

Orange is not just an ISP. It's a multinational mobile telecom company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_SA [wikipedia.org]. As far as I know, after they were bought by France Telecom, they moved many their servers to a unique class B adress space. Maybe that address you found is from the old ones, which is not used anymore for mail, so unblocking it doesn't interest them.

On the other hand, getting a blacklist like this, doesn't seem to solve your problem: getting less SPAM. Do you think spammers don't have enough mo

sbl-xbl

[Halo1 (136547)]

sbl contains the spamhauses, xbl trojaned boxes/open proxies etc (you can of course also only use one of them). See http://www.spamhaus.org/xbl/index.lasso [spamhaus.org]

sorbs is one the best blacklists out there

[cyberfoxz (207499)]

I work at the abuse dept. of a large dutch ISP and we rely heavily on sorbs. When I started working there one of my collegues convinced us that there is no way you could be able to contact sorbs and I thought that to be true. We found out however that it is really not that hard to get in touch with them and if you follow their guidlines, you never have to pay for delisting. The paying part is mainly to scare of spammers delisting adresses they do not own. They use a smal set of totaly acceptable rules to delist adresses from their DUL list (if u use a mailserver on a dynamic adres, go get a static one. If you can't, you should be using your ISP's mailserver). Their rules:
1. Only the owner of the adress space may contact them, as listed in one of the five RIR databases (RIPE, ARIN etc). We always use [e-mail], because this is a known adress in RIPE.
2. The IP adress must be known as static and have a PTR-record stating it is static (mail.domain.com is acceptable).
3. It must have a correct A-record.
4. The TTL in of the A-record must be 86400 sec.
If you contact them in the way they wish to be contacted (just read their website, it's not that hard), they will delist you in 24-48 hours. However, if you aren't the owner of the adress space or the simple rules are not followed, your request wil be ignored. Everyone who thinks they can't get through to sorbs just isn't reading their guidelines, it's that simple.

Re:

[TheLink (130905)]

One of the best? Really? So what's their false positive and false negative rate?

So far in my experience RBLs have an unacceptably high false positive rate because of the way most of them work - they go by IP _ranges_.

My email provider doesn't block spam for me, they just give it a spam ranking. I then run my email through a bayes filter, if the ISP's ranking is high enough for my comfort or the bayes thingy thinks it's spam, then it's spam.

So far I've noticed only a few false positives (I scan very quickly

Re:

[Thorizdin (456032)]

Sorry, but this is incorrect. SORBS does _not_ make execptions for people who follow the rules, at least not in the 8 tickets that we have had to open with them. They can be contacted via their web site ticketing system, but communication is slow, arrogant, ignorant, and inconsistent. We were able to get delisted once without paying their blackmail, but the next time we were listed they refused to even provide headers so we could locate the offender. Perhaps you were fortunant enough to only have to dea

Maybe a change of tactics is in order.

[kunwon1 (795332)]

ORDB just shut its doors. From their closing announcement: (emphasis mine)

We regret to inform you that ORDB.org, at the ripe age of five and a half, is shutting down. 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.

We encourage system owners to remove ORDB checks from their mailers immediately and start investigating alternative methods of spam filtering. We recommend a combination involving greylisting and content-based analysis (such as the dspam project, bmf or Spam Assassin).

SpamHaus

[Wdomburg (141264)]

SpamHaus is the only blacklist that I trust to do straight blocking on. We've been using them for years and have gotten a grand total of two complaints about blocked mail; in both cases the sender was on the XBL because their machine was compomised. Considering our active userbase is in the hundreds of thousands, I'd say that isn't bad at all. :)

We actively discourage people from using SORBS. Even if they were more accurate, their removal policy is extortion.

Any of the other blacklists out there I would recommend only as part of a scoring algorithm. Most are fairly cavalier about blocking entire netblocks even if the problem is isolated, most have no automatic aging of entries, many have poor delisting policies or are slow to respond and the false positive rates tend to vary from ok to abysmal (SpamCop, for example, doesn't seem to know the difference between a bounce message and a piece of spam... though to their credit they are fairly good about removals and provide a feedback loop so you at least know when they've tagged a message as spam).

Blacklists are so 2004

[target562 (623649)]

With the advent of the spam bot networks, blacklists aren't as useful for spam fighting as they used to be. Greylisting + content analysis is currently the way to go; though Spamhaus still does a decent job, but not Spamcop due to their "unsolicited bounces" thing...

No one takes them seriously

[Spazmania (174582)]

At this point, very few people take SORBS seriously. They're inaccurately over-aggressive. If you use it for more than your personal email, you're begging for a lot of user complaints.

My own fun story is that they went on to my web site and subscribed their spamtraps to my opt-in email list. I didn't double-confirm, so I guess its my fault that they scammed me. SORBS then used the emails emitted from that single IP address to justify blocking 8,192 of my ISP's email addresses.

Every other RBL maintainer has found my list to be clean. The only non-SORBS problem I've had with an RBL was with Spamcop. That was immediately resolved when the only folks who responded to further inquiry apologized for reporting the list mail by mistake.

Re:

[geminidomino (614729)]

How many Scoring Algorithms can be used during the DATA phase?

Re:

[cshotton (46965)]

You have to realize this is a war. Much more than 50 percent of email is spam - we have to take drastic measures to provide a basic service - email.

That is because e-mail is an inherently broken set of protocols that were designed in the 70's as a hack to implement a store and forward message system on the old ARPAnet. If the e-mail industry spent the same amount of effort on engineering a next generation set of e-mail protocols and authentication methods that they spend on hacks like black hole lists, w

Re:

[sauge (930823)]

There are a large crowd of email maintainers who believe anonymous email is important for political reasons.

I think your right on the mark though with the pharmacy analogy. We were able to implement SMTP to ESMTP quite easily so it shows people can definitely implement changes in protocols.

I also vote with people who think black hole lists are pretty much useless these days because they swallow up so many innocent people/organizations.

It would be nice to have an open source barracuda ( http://www.barracuda [barracudanetworks.com]