🚀 go-pugleaf

Javier Henderson <javier@kjsl.com> writes:
>	Do they probe once in a while, or are they really persistant
>to the point of being disruptive?

I haven't heard of ORBS probes being accused of being a denial of service.
And AboveNet can probably handle e-mail volumes that would be withering to
our residential e-mail servers.

I think admins who block ORBS probes mainly fall into two categories:
1) people who don't like any probing of their servers for anything
   (Some degree of paranoia is a good thing to protect one's server.
   People have to decide where to draw the line for themselves.)
2) people who want to make a point about ORBS because they know ORBS lists
   sites who block them, even if no spam ever came from there.

>	Keep in mind there's a lot of servers hosted at above.net, so
>ORBS activity could account for a lot of overall traffic.

Well, you know about some of the people at AboveNet...  Some of them run
MAPS, which is generally considered to be a responsible blocking list.
That's as opposed to ORBS, which has some percentage of politically-added
entries.  So I think they'd probably fit in the second category.  They
knew they were going to get listed by ORBS but they probably did it anyway
to make a point about ORBS.  By following its odd policy to the extreme of
adding a responsible backbone provider to its list, ORBS made itself much
less useful to its users.

Of course, AboveNet has strictly-enforced anti-spam policies so they
wouldn't get on any list by anyone who's primarily interested in stopping
spam.  My recommendation: if your server uses ORBS, drop it.  Use one or
more of the MAPS-hosts lists including RBL, DUL and RSS.  Info is at
http://www.mail-abuse.org/