A Peculiar Blog

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Just in case there’s still some people running mail servers that rely on the ordb.org spam identification system I can assure you that, No, all the disappearing email many of your users are probably complaining about hasn’t just been booked on cheap flights to China. Instead, you’ll probably find tons of emails wherever your mail system is set to send mail that gets a positive spam result from ordb.org’s Open Relay DataBase.

I found out about this from an item on slashdot about it after looking around to find out why a number of emails that I had sent had bounced back identified as spam when they’d never done so before.

Apparently ordb had shut down in dec of 2006, but there’s a lot of people who had not removed it from their spam filters. So, to get ‘em to notice, they set the thing to return false positives on all queries. This has the result of blocking *ALL* email on mail servers that are still configured to use ordb.org for spam checking.

Technorati Tags: email, false+positives, lost+mail, mail+server, missing+mail, old+configuration, open+relay, open+relay+database, ordb, spam, spam+filter

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