[RFCI-Discuss] RBL And remote host

[csmailreport]

On Dec 27, 2007 10:56 AM, Dmitry Rybin <kirgudu at corbina.net> wrote:

> Remote host doesn't receive mail from my server, because my server in
> SORBS RBL.
>

[Sorry for being off-charter on this ML]

If that can reassure you, anyone who refuses email solely based on SORBS
blacklisting is totally nuts and misses out a great of legitimate emails
from the Internet.

For instance, SORBS has always listed most of France Telecom's (aka Orange
aka Wanadoo) official outbound mail servers IP addresses, so they can't
receive legitimate emails from... maybe half of France ?
( whether this is good or bad is left to decide as an exercise for the
reader :-P )

You can check by yourself that both IP addresses are listed at
http://www.au.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml :

smtp2e.orange.fr.       3600    IN      A       80.12.242.111
smtp2e.orange.fr.       3600    IN      A       80.12.242.112

I've heard from FT that they tried getting unlisted from SORBS, but even
paying whatever fee they requested (like US$ 50 or 100), they were re-listed
after 24 or 48 hours, so they've totally given up trying to get delisted
long ago. [disclaimer: I am not related to France Telecom or their
subsidiaries such as Orange or Telecom Poland.

Bottom line: anyone using the SORBS RBL to refuse email right away is
refusing a huge amount of legitimate mails out there, and you're not alone.
At best SORBS should be used as part of a "scoring" system such as
SpamAssassin's, and looking at the "spam points" currently granted by SORBS
listings at http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_2_x.html they are rather
low (from 0 to 0.18, 0.3, 0.6, 0.8 or 1 at most) unlike SpamHaus.org's or
RFC-Ignorant scores which typically range from 1 to 3 points.

My advice is not to worry at all about SORBS... after all, a system
administrator can configure his mail server to refuse email from almost
anyone else over the Internet: that would still be RFC compliant (if done
properly), and it's his mail server, so that's his problem (and the problem
of his users missing the emails they expect), not yours. Using SORBS to
refuse email almost achieves the same results.

Cheers
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