Antispam blacklist service The Open Relay Database (ORDB) has pulled the plug after five and a half years because of spammers’ growing sophistication.ORDB was designed to deal with a technique in which spammers used SMTP proxy servers to flood the Internet with junk e-mail. The project distributed a blacklist of mail servers that allowed third-party relay—”open relays”—and were thus liable to be used by spammers.But the list had leveled off at about 225,000 over the past year and updates have slowed to a crawl, the volunteer-run project acknowledged. “It’s been a case of a long goodbye as very little work has gone into maintaining ORDB for a while,” organizers said in a message this week on the project’s website. “The general consensus within the team is that open relay RBLs (Real-time Blackhole Lists) are no longer the most effective way of preventing spam from entering your network.”ORDB is essentially a victim of its own success. Five years ago, about 90 percent of spam was sent through open relays, and now the figure is less than 1 percent, due to blocking lists and to ISPs disallowing third-party relay. While the shift has stopped one type of spam distribution, it has also caused inconvenience for users, who were once able to use open relays, for example, to connect to mail servers from different locations. Spammers haven’t been deterred and generally now rely on botnets, networks of compromised PCs, to send spam.The project said users should remove ORDB checks from mailers immediately. As a replacement, the project recommended a combination of greylisting and content-based analysis, such as dspam, bmf or Spam Assassin. -Matthew Broersma, Techworld.com (London)Related Links: The Spam Before Christmas (CIO.com blog entry) E.U. Fights Flood of Unwanted Mail U.S. Tops List of Spam-Relaying Countries in Q3 IronPort: Image-Based Spam Now in the BillionsCheck out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content events promotion Australia's CIO50 Team of the Year Awards finalists revealed Along with the unveiling of the annual CIO50 List and the team category winners, the 2023 CIO50 Awards will also recognise the inaugural Next CIO winner and a new Hall of Fame recipient. By Cathy O'Sullivan May 31, 2023 3 mins IDG Events brandpost API security: key to interoperability or key to an organization? Understanding the risks of using APIs and how to prepare to address those risks. By Keith Zelinski, Managing Director, Technology Consulting May 31, 2023 6 mins Digital Transformation brandpost Designing the campus of the future starts with high-quality 10 Gbps connectivity By Huawei May 31, 2023 4 mins Network Architect Networking Devices Networking brandpost How an Indian real-estate juggernaut keeps growing by harnessing the power of zero A South Indian real-estate titan is known for the infinite variety and impressive scale of its projects, but one of its most towering achievements amounts to nothing literally. By Michael Kure, SAP Contributor May 31, 2023 5 mins Digital Transformation Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe