DNSBL – Everything MDaemon

rbl.orbitrbl.com – Dead

Posted on 2014-10-25 by Dave Warren (everything-mdaemon.com) — No Comments ↓

If you’re currently using rbl.orbitrbl.com for spam blocking or filtering, you should probably remove it from your configuration immediately.

Luckily this DNSBL was not widely used, and is not part of a default MDaemon configuration, so most MDaemon administrators will not need to take any action. If you do have MDaemon configured to use it, you’re currently seeing either timeouts or errors, and shortly you will find a majority of inbound mail will be flagged as spam.

Mark Jeftovic of EasyDNS recently posted the following to the mailop mailing list.

As some of you may know, we recently took over ZoneEdit.com and it’s customer base.

We’ve found a domain on the system: rbl.orbitrbl.com which is delegated to zoneedit nameservers, broken (it is not allowed to zone transfer from it’s designated master), unresponsive (account owner is not answering email, has an address in Sri Lanka and no telephone number), is using excessive queries (~ >500M queries per day on a “free dns” domain) and attracting repeated, multiple DDoS attacks.

As such, we will be wildcarding this zone and setting a long TTL fairly soon.

If you’re actually using this RBL in your MTAs, now’s a good time to stop. (this RBL is broken on 5 out of it’s 6 delegated nameservers across 3 separate providers).

I’d like to thank Mark for giving everyone advanced warning.

Another DNSBL lost, NJABL shutdown

Posted on 2013-03-01 by Dave Warren (everything-mdaemon.com) — No Comments ↓

Accordnig to NJABL’s website, they’re shutting down effective immediately:

March 1, 2013: NJABL is in the process of being shut down. The DNSBL zones have been emptied. After “the Internet” has had some time to remove NJABL from server configs, the NS’s will be pointed off into unallocated space to hopefully make the shutdown obvious to those who were slower to notice.

If you have NJABL listed in your MDaemon or SecurityGateway configuration, you should probably remove it immediately. MDaemon’s SpamAssassin automatically uses NJABL as well, but as long as you have automatic updates enabled no action is required, SpamAssassin will be disabling NJABL per bug 6913.

To NJABL’s operators: Thanks for all your time and efforts, it was appreciated!

ORDB.org blacklisting all IP addresses

Posted on 2008-03-26 by Dave Warren (everything-mdaemon.com) — 2 Comments ↓

Since yesterday, March 25 ORDB.org – one of the old SPAM blacklist databases – started to blacklist all IP addresses. As a result, all mail servers using a spam filtering solution that still references ORDB (relays.ordb.org) started to immediately block all incoming e-mails. I got some reports into my personal e-mail yesterday, that finally got fixed by my provider today.

If you’re running MDaemon 9.60 or newer (released June 12, 2007) then MDaemon’s installer automatically removed relays.ordb.org from your spam blocker configuration, but if you’re on an earlier version you might want to double check your configuration.

To check to see whether or not you’re using ORDB, open the MDaemon GUI, go to the Security menu, look for either “DNS Blacklist” (in newer versions) or “Spam Blocker” (older versions), and see if you see any mention of “ordb.org” in your list — If you find it, select and remove that entry and you should be good to go.

Although ORDB.org was shut down on December 18, 2006, yesterday they changed their behaviour, and instead of timing out, they are blocking all IP addresses, that is, every e-mail server queried is being reported as an open relay — Depending on your configuration, this may result in all mail being blocked, or it may simply increase the chances that legitimate mail is treated as spam.