SORBS CONSIDERED HARMFUL

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SORBS CONSIDERED HARMFUL

XS4ALL discourages the use of SORBS blacklists for refusing email for the following reasons:

• SORBS will list a mail server on their blacklist after reception of only one or a few (spam) mails. XS4ALL strives to send as few spams as possible from the network, for example by quickly filtering abused clients. However, this doesn't prevent spam being sent at all with several hundred thousand customers.
  
  
• In some cases bounces, out-of-office messages, or automatic replies from mailinglists are treated as spam and used to blacklist the sending mail server.
  
  
• Removing an IP address from the sorbs blacklist is excessively difficult to almost impossible, and often results in discussions with the SORBS volunteer or volunteers about the anti-spam solutions in use. The tone used in said discussions is not helpful.
  
  
• The official way to remove an address from the SORBS blacklist is by donating to a legal defense fund for a lawsuit that was ended in 2002.
  
  
• Because it is so difficult to remove an IP address from the list, SORBS as a blacklist produces many false positives.
  
  
• Because it takes a long time before a spamming IP address reliably appears on the blacklist, not much spam is stopped. SORBS appears completely unsuitable to the most common way of spamming, via botnets.
  

If you were directed to this page because your mail server uses the SORBS blacklist, then XS4ALL advices you to stop using SORBS as a method to reject mail, because there is a good chance that you stop legitimate email from XS4ALL users.

You can find alternatives at www.dnsbl.com at the reviews.

XS4ALL uses the zen.spamhaus.org blacklist as part of the standard spam filter, stopping a lot of spam with almost zero false positives. See www.spamhaus.org/organization/dnsblusage.html for usage information on the spamhaus blacklists.

XS4ALL abuse department

www.xs4all.nl/bl/sorbs/