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Osirusoft/SPEWS shut down

Thor86

Diamond Member
The following was brought to my attention this past week when one of the RBL providers have shut down their systems causing mail to not get through.


http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/27/0214238&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126
As of today, Osirusoft, distributer of the SPEWS and open relay blocklists, among others, is no longer operational. Servers using these lists (including the FTC) are currently rejecting ALL email. This shutdown seems to be in response to a several-week-long DDoS attack on Osirusoft, SPEWS and others, resulting in both sites being down. This has caused much discussion on n.a.n-a.e, including the suggestion that the attack is somehow related to the SoBig worm. The spammers must be hurting if they can devote these kinds of resources to attacking blocklists." Read on below a related submission.

NSXDavid writes "Earlier today our site mysteriously ended up on Joe Jared's Osirusoft SPAM blacklist which is used by lots of antispam software (like SpamAssassin and sendmail). Since he is currently under a serious DDoS attack, there was no way to appeal this decision. We contacted Mr. Jared by phone who informed us that 'everyone needs to stop using Osirusoft and that he's going to be shutting the service down.' Then he says he's going to blacklist 'the world' (aka, ban *.*.*.*) to get his point across. Later on this evening, he apparently went ahead and did just that. Succumbing to lawsuits and DDoS, a once great blacklist is dead. SpamAssassin is removing it from their config in the next release (rc3) and email admins around the globe are reconfiguring their mail servers."


It would be suggested that spam filters STOP using Osirusoft's blacklist any longer, as we used it before as well. But now since we have also experienced client mail bouncing back due to the above we have removed SPEWS/Osirusoft from our RBL provider list on our mail server.
 
SPEWS was stupid anyway. The majority of blacklists are poorly run, block many innocent IP's and cause as much trouble as the spam they are trying to block. SPEWS=GAY
 

You can still use SPAMCOP and ORDB
If you're really having spam probs, and you allow direct SMTP to your server ( vs pickup from ISP POP box ), then you could go to the ARIN database, look up all the ranges, and ban the whole world, then just add the qualified domains you want to your whitelist.
 
Originally posted by: TechBoyJK
SPEWS was stupid anyway. The majority of blacklists are poorly run, block many innocent IP's and cause as much trouble as the spam they are trying to block. SPEWS=GAY

That was part of the reason behind SPEWS. All the innocents had to do was either use an ISP that was not a haven for spammers or convince their ISP that spamming was bad. I don't think SPEWS had a sexual orientation, or a mood.
 
If they would whitelist specific ip's or some other method to allow trusted non-spammers' email through even though they're on an ip block with a spammer, I wouldn't have a problem with SPEWS. The two netblocks allocated to my machine are blacklisted. Most of Nlayer is blacklisted I guess and there's nothing I can do to get off that blacklist, short of changing colo facils/providers (somethign I can't afford to do.)
 
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