🚀 go-pugleaf

John R Pierce <spamhater@hogranch.com> writes:
>Sigh, I run a mail list on a friend's majordomo server, he also is
>blocked by ORBS, probably for much the same politically motivated
>reasons (said friend is heavily involved with MAPS).  Anyways, a
>subscriber has recently had his messages bounced by cwo.com ... anyone
>know anything about these guys?  I've emailed their admins suggesting
>that they should reconsider using ORBS, or at least qualifying it, but
>gotten no response (of course, it IS a holiday weekend).

If they have weekend and holiday support, you might be lucky.  Not everyone
does.

Once you do get them on the line, another thing to mention about ORBS is
the effect they have.  Both of these need to be fixed...
1) With so many sites listed due to refusal to submit to ORBS's probes,
   they have a chronic problem of false positives in their list.
   That does not help mail server admins.
2) Since they publish a list of cases that weren't closed within 30 days,
   they actually help spammers find a renewing supply of open relays.
   The introduction of ORBS in 1998 corresponded with an explosion in
   e-mail spams.  Though I'm not one to jump to conspiracy theories,
   the timing on this was too close to be a coincidence - it was at least
   a significant contributor.

So even though this is not what they intended, ORBS's policies have the
result that they help spammers and hinder admins trying to implement
spam filtering.