Of all people out there, I’m a quite vocal opponent of spamming – that is, unsolicited emails usually advertising some product or other. I know this problem won’t go away anytime soon. Indeed, almost every day I spend 30 minutes to an hour cleaning out literally thousands of spam messages from dozens of inboxes, so obviously I don’t consider this fun.
Recently a small non-profit association I’ve helped out in the past contacted me with an interesting problem – they were unable to send messages to Cogeco users. A bit of research revealed that their SMTP server was on an IP address blocked by SORBS, a DNS blacklist service that a number of ISPs apparently use when determining what messages may or may not be spam.
Further research revealed that this non-profit was using a shared server from a US-based hosting service. The IP address in question supported at least a few dozen different sites owened by different people – standard shared hosting fare. Okay, nothing unusual, so I started looking into getting the IP address removed, since the non-profit was not a spammer and this was hampering their ability to contact members of their association.
Imagine my surprise when I discover this delisting process:
” The effected IPs (the ones used to send the spam) will only be delisted when US$50 is donated to a SORBS nominated charity or good cause. The charities and good causes SORBS approves will not have any connection with any member of the SORBS administrators either past or present. ”
Now, this immediately disturbed me, so I did a google search for the definition of ‘extortion’ and came up with this. “Extortion is a criminal offense, which occurs when a person obtains money, behaviour, or other goods and/or services from another by wrongfully threatening or inflicting harm to his person, reputation, or property. Euphemistically, refraining from doing harm is sometimes called “protection”.”
Now, some people online have argued that it isn’t exactly extortion because SORBS isn’t actually blocking your emails; rather, it’s the particular ISPs that decide to use SORBS as a guideline for mail-blocking.
This, to me, is bullshit. If extortion does include the reputation element, then SORBS is definitely damaging your reputation by implying you are a spammer, and then requiring you to pay money in order to remove the spot on your reputation. The fact that SORBS doesn’t get the money is irrelevant. This is a bit like the mob not trashing your business so long as you support a political party they approve of, or some other thing. What if for whatever reason you disagree with the SORBS-handpicked charities?
In addition, this particular blacklist service is totally unfair to small organizations and individuals who can’t afford dedicated servers of their own. Most teenagers, and probably a lot of adults, run websites totally out of a sense of community, and if they’re unable to use some of the resources of their website such as the SMTP server because of some asshole spammer using shared space, it’s hardly their fault. The same applies to the masses of computer-illiterates who get backdoored and zombified for the purposes of spam – sure, they’re hard on the community at large, but the problem isn’t the computer user, it’s the spammer. $50 may not be a lot of money to a big corporation but for a minimum-wage working person, that’s a quarter of a week’s wages.
To sorta sum up, I think SORBS took a good idea and a motive of protecting the community, and ran WAY too far with it. I’m sure the charities listed by SORBS are quite happy, but I doubt anyone else is. By basically extorting money in exchange for reputation, SORBS is revealing itself to be the selfish bully of the anti-spam battle, hurting anyone who happens to get in the way in its zeal to be seen as a leader in anti-spam technology and DNSBLs. To those fighting the spam battle on the ISP and hosting ends, I say fuck SORBS and use something a little more fair to the small guys caught in the crossfire.
Nate On The Net 
109 responses to “SORBS Sucks”
very impressive and smart, i like how you think..
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Yeah, I havn’t had any problems with sorbs in that area since I’m not running a smtp-server. Altough I’ve gotten listed for having a server that’s exploitable because of an Open HTTP Proxy. -In January. (Note, it’s December.)
Now I’m trying to get delisted, and it’s really not that easy. F.e. there’s some error when confirming the retest request for my ip.
And they havn’t even got a messageboard, so I can’t tell anyone about it neither.
I wish I could say anything positive about sorbs. But the more I read about them, the less I like them.
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Yeah, this was posted in October and I still have nothing positive to say about them. If even one webmaster notices this and reconfigures their spam traps to avoid using SORBS I’ll be happy. One can always hope:-)
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I had never even heard of SORBS until one day i whois’d myself (at whois.sc) and it shows blacklist status. I learned I was being blacklisted by SORBS. How am I supposed to annoy a company I’d never heard of? I’ve never spammed a day in my life, but according to SORBS I’ve been on the blacklist for every day the past month and a half. This is ridiculous.
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Excellent writing. I’ve basically been going through the same frustration for months. Thankfully, due to our clients emails now getting through to various ISPs, I can only conclude that SORBS is being used less and less. The attitude at SORBS is unacceptable. Whether it’s run by unpaid volunteers or not does give them the right to act as they do. I am done trying to communicate with them and have now started campaigning against their use. SORBS is not only a type of exortion, it is a type of slander as well. Maybe it’s time for a class action against them? hmmmmm.
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I also never heard of them before until I noticed a 90% drop of readers for the last 2 weeks. Then I find I’m on their blacklist. I don’t even have smtp, pop, imap or anything that can email on my dedicated server. My IP is static, but sorbs insist that it’s dynamic, since my isp (Wanadoo France) don’t communicate their IP ranges, and they don’t run a normal reverse DNS.
So I’m caught in the middle and now need to declare bankrupt.
SORBS doesn’t care, they prefer that there were no websites out there, because then there will be no spam.
And BTW, I haven’t noticed any drop in spam levels, so it would seem the only victims are the innocent users, not the spammers.
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Sorbs sucks, and I hope they die a horrific death, ideally a large lawsuit by someone for deformation or something. I used to use SORBS for filtering email, and it only blocked people I wanted to recieve emails from, now I’m finding myself on the other end unable to email people I need to email because there ISP badly configured there email server to use SORBS.
Wouln’t have a problem with them if they de-listed automaticly and actually responded to support requests filed by me and my hosting provider.
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I have been running my own mailserver for my domain and a few other vanity domains for a year now. I set up a postfix server, and does a lot of email validation to prevent spam. Also, I use a number of DNSBLs. Most notably for me is spamhaus. I was also using SORBS. After setting up my server correctly, I saw a drastic reduction in spam. Proper header, envelope, dns checks helped reduce the spam about 30% (aparantly a lot of spammers use custom software that writes poorly formatted, non-RFC compliant emails). After setting up some DNSBLs (not including SORBS) I was then getting abouta 90% reduction in spam. Adding SORBs then took out an additional 1-2%. The rest then was filtered through DSPAM or SpamAssassin. Those emails would be delivered, but then it was up to the clients to decide what to do with them.
I remember reading some debates about SORBS months ago about it’s overzealous and careless blacklisting service. The complaint was from a manager of a small ISP. The debate got rather heated and the user’s complant kinda fell apart because his credibility became questionable. So I was on the fence and continued to SORBS.
I kept an eye on SORBS and didn’t notice anything unusal. Then about a month ago, I started having trouble receiving emails from friends, and potential clients. At first I tried following up with their ISP’s about the situation, and I often got the same story that is described here. Most are ISP’s that got listed for some various reason, and wouldn’t pay the fees due to the fact that SORBS improperly listed them.
So I started whitelisting the servers that I knew that were having these problems. This became an uphill battle for me. So eventually I read more on the situation, and finally decided to drop SORBS. They were only blocking mostly legitimate email at this point. I can’t risk my business or my friendships to their careless practices.
Right now, my spam level is still under control using legitimate DNSBLs, and proper email server configuration. as far as DNSBLs, I highly recommend Spamhaus.org’s combination SBL-XBL service. Their methods of blacklisting is much more methodical and heavily research. they also keep very thourough documentation on the top 200 known spammers. They are responsible for about 80% of the world’s spam traffic.
The world doesn’t need careless extortionists like SORBS to make the Spam fight an uphill battle.
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I recently put together a email system for myself that does Bayesian classification using SpamAssassin tests as well as the message text as input. One of the benefits is I get to see, using my own email as a real-world test, which SA tests work and which ones don’t.
Messages that are flagged by both SORBS and NJABL at the same time are only 2% more likely to be spam than messages that aren’t. A monkey throwing darts would have a reasonable chance of doing a better job than those guys (and would probably not hurt as many innocent bystanders).
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SORBS is an internet pirate, an extortionist, a thief, a fraud, and a gangster. SORBS looks like a snivelling little busybody pipsqueak of a wannabe girly-man spewing lies from a rostrum made of his own excrement. SORBS interferes with information processing systems and uses a technicality to skirt the law. SORBS unwarrantedly blocks e-mails of valuable content from reaching mailing lists to which human beings are subscribed as members in good standing. Victims can’t even unsuscribe once this happens, and what do we call e-mail we can’t unsuscribe from? SPAM. SORBS causes SPAM. The pompous and supercilious reply e-mails from their cowardly and hidden ‘volunteer’ seems to be come from Australia? I bet he wears his momma’s underwear and drinks 3.2 beer imported from Oklahoma. Mad Max needs to visit SORBS and make them feel remorseful. I hope SORBS dies a horrible death that destroys the personal lives of all involved and their families, and quickly bleeds out their financial assets to the last universal credit. If they were based in Texas, they would have been taken care of already, one way or another. We don’t like no carpetbaggers around here. Maybe later I’ll comment on how I really feel. We now return you to your regular conversation about spam blocking methods and why SORBS sucks.
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I work in the IT department and a co-worker accidently download an email virus that
stole their address book. The virus sent out ~1000 emails to AOL before I could
shut it down since it happened at night. This crap happens and is part of the territory
of IT. But as a result our company was blacklist by SORBS but nobody else. I paid the
“ransom” to the Joey McNicol Foundation on January 3, 2006 and have not received a single
response from SORBS even after sending 4 mails ( 3 nice and 1 nasty-gram). Since I
can’t get any satisfaction from SORBS, I submitted the following complaint with PayPal
and waiting ….. I use Spamhaus and SpamCop as my DNSBL and have no complaints.
It’s ironic that SORBS promotes anti-spamming while holding innocent parties hostage
to “internet terrorism” and “ransom”. We fell victim, as many companies do, to mail viri.
We do are best to protect ourselves but there are a lot of “mean” people out there.
Unfortunately, SORBS is just as bad.
Please refer to URL: http://www.au.sorbs.net/faq/spamdb.shtml
I paid the “ransom” to joey@vtgts.com and was willing to let it go at that. If you read the
very last text box on SORBS webpage, I would be delisted within 24 hours. I followed the
instructions on the webpage and did include the IP address, etc in the PayPal comments.
In addition, I did notify SORBS at paid@sorbs.net and attached a copy of the receipt.
This transaction took place on Jan. 3, 2006. I’ve written SORBS at paid@sorbs.net 4 times
requesting information and status. I have never received a SINGLE response to my emails.
Even though SORBS claims to have no affiliation with the Joey McNicol Foundation, a
reasonable person could infer that a “favorable outcome” would occur. I feel like I got
screwed twice … once to pay the “ransom” and twice because I got “no response from SORBS”.
Even though you can’t refund my money, I feel that PayPal has a responsibility not to be a
“money laundry” for SORBS and the McNicol Foundation or an unsuspecting agent for “charitable”
donations by “internet terrorist”. Like terrorist, they are cowards hiding behind SORBS anonymity
as “hidden volunteers” for the “common good”. I think I hear this rhetoric on the evening news
except the speakers have cloth wrapped around their faces.
I hope that it doesen’t take too many of these complaints to shutdown this criminal and
extortionist activity.
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The system does work!! I received the following email from PayPal.
Unfortunately, we are still blacklist…..
Dear Mike Hagan,
We have concluded our investigation of your Buyer Complaint. The details of
this claim are listed below.
We have decided in your favor, and as a result, have attempted to recover
funds from the seller.
The maximum amount we were able to recover was $50.00 USD. This amount has
been credited to your PayPal account. Please allow up to five business days
for this adjustment to be reflected in your PayPal account.
If you are due any additional amount from the seller, we will make our best
effort to recover the balance from the seller.
If the seller’s account has insufficient funds to complete the refund owed
to you, please be assured that we will take appropriate action against the
seller’s account, which may include limitation of the seller’s account
privileges.
Details of Disputed Transaction
Transaction Date: Dec 23, 2005
Transaction Amount: -$50.00 USD
Your Transaction ID: XXXXXXXXXXXX
Seller’s Transaction ID: XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Case Number: PP-XXXXXXXXXXXX
Seller’s Name: T3 Direct versus Joseph McNicol case Trust Fund
Seller’s Email: joey@vtgts.com
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Hi Mike,
Good to see that you got your money back, at least. It’s a shame that people are still dealing with this issue. Still hoping that more webmasters will notice the problem and stop using SORBS as a source for blacklisting.
Nathan
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I’d been blissfully ignorant of the existance of SORBS until a few days ago, when a posting to a ham radio web reflector bounced. So… I went out to thier website to find out exactly what in the hell was going on.
It appeared, as near as I could make out, that my ISP’s IP portal in Chicago had been used several months ago to carry Spam, so EVERY piece of traffic from it was now being blocked!
I filed one of thier assistance requests, and got a reply from them. The volunteer / extortionist (Dan) told me that I wasn’t personally blacklisted, it was the ISP… so until I I did THIER legwork for them and pressured my ISP to pay the shakedown money, I was just plain S.O.L.!
Suffice it to say that my reply informed them (A) that I refused to be a part of thier little extortion racket, (B) thier “service” is MORE of a pain in the ass than the Spam, and (C) Up His, and the same to the horse that he rode in on!
On another listserve I mentioned this little adventure, and wound up on this blog.
One member suggested that I report this little scumbag to the FBI’s Organized Crime Division, and there might be something to that… after all, when asked, Al Capone used to say that he was in the insurance business! To me tho, this whole scam seems more like the Joe McCarthy / HUAC blacklisting thing; SORBS goes after a problem in the name of a Greater Good, and when the innocent get screwed in the process they’re just unavoidable collateral damage.
I’ll be DAMNED if I’ll pay this little shitbird ONE CENT, or cooperate with his shakedown racket in any way!
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One of our servers is blacklisted after customer e-mails to cogeco bounced back. The source of spam was one of our customer accounts, really not an open relay or quite frankly anything that can be prevented from happening again unless of course we suspend all existing customers. We will not pay the ransom. We will let our customer know this is a problem with cogeco because they are doing the blocking. It will be up to cogeco to stop using SORBS or their customers will never receive e-mails from ours. We will pay any penalty fee that is not one bit our fault. Neither will our customer who had his password stolen.
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mean to say will not pay any penalty.. lol
I advice everyone who is in our shoes to do the same. Ask the ISP to stop using SORBS!
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I work for a regional ISP. We are currently having similar issues with SORBS. They have decided that they don’t like our DNS names and/or TTL, so they’re black listing many of our IP blocks. They refuse to remove any of our IPs, unless we change our names and/or TTL to their liking. To make matters worse, their delisting process is a joke, their support sucks and english seems to be their second language.
Needless to say, we are not using SORBS anymore, and I urge all other ISPs to stop using them as well.
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Really it is the people that continue to use the SORBS blacklist. I am having a problem getting through to a customer that SORBS is an extortion racket and use another blacklist service. The users are up in arms and say we should pay the “fine” but our ISP point blank refuses to deal with SORBS.
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SORBS sucks, is unresponsive and SORBS is extortion.
We manage email for 25,000 domains and subdomains. One of our NAT IPs is in sorbs for something that happened over a month ago. We terminate spammers (mostly 419 scammers) immediately, but thats not good enough for SORBS. They never respond.
Cogeco uses SORBS so now I am receiving a lot of mail about the inability to send to friends and businesses. Cogeco has been contacted. They haven’t responded either. (At least they have a phone number, unlike SORBS).
This is OK by me because I’ve just added Cogeco to our own DNSBL so we will reject all their mail. Lets see how long it takes them to respond to their own customers. We receive spam from cogeco accounts every day, but you can’t block a complete ISP for a few pieces of spam when they host thousands of account. You just have to expect they will fix it, by contacting them. If you ever get spam from us, try it – it works.
I don’t know what game SORBS thinks they are playing. Do they think that other people don’t get spam or that we don’t care about it? How much spam do you think we might get, having that many domains? We add and delete IPs and domains from our lists all the time. I’d like to get $50 for each one, but that is impractical. How much do AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail charge to get you off their list? Nothing. Its part of running a service.
Any company that uses an unresponsive, amateur list like SORBS doesn’t know anything about email or how life works.
If SORBS had a model like SpamCop, it wouldn’t be a problem – come to think of it, while there is SpamCop, what use is SORBS?
Alan.
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I have a pretty clean email account. My machine is used strictly for business, all the virus program data bases are up to date, and we also run zone alarm. In short, I’m not a high risk candidate for virus attacks or spam generation.
However, some low-life bureaucrat in SORBS has decided that Namesecure, who is our email host, is a spam generator, and they have actually blacklisted all or some of Namesecure’s customer base, both incoming and outgoing. Suddenly, I not only can’t send emails to any other address where the URL was originally registered by Namesecure, I can’t receive emails from anyone using a Namesecure hosted email address. What’s worse, is that SORBS has it set up so that you don’t even know when your emails are bounced until the next day and in the case of blocked incoming mail, you don’t find out at all.
When I complained to SORBS, they responded with an insult and a copy of their usual demand to send money to their favorite charity. When I complained to Namesecure, the brutal, banal, bureaucratic drivel that came back is repeated below for your reading pleasure. A few observations;
SORBS is so abusive in their responses to these complaints that I have to wonder if this whole thing is really one big scam. Scam artists typically behave this way. If someone questions you, respond immediately and very aggressively. It scares people off.
We need to deal with this by addressing complaints, not to SORBS, but to the people who are paying them. In other words, to the ISPs and email hosts who are allowing SORBS to exist. I for one, will remove all my personal and business registrations and email hosting accounts from Namesecure’s clutches as each expires.
If a small group of us pooled our efforts and started investigating SORBS, and the so called charities they are supporting, I’m willing to bet we would find some interesting ownership records in common. It’s not that hard to do. All this info is available on line. Just takes time and sweat equity. Anybody interested?
Unilaterally terminating telecommunications services is this manner probably constitutes a restriction of interstate trade, and possibly wire fraud. Both are federal offenses. How about writing to your congressional representative?
Write to the “readers comments†page of as many PC magazines and newspapers as you can, outlining the problem. Eventually this will get someone’s attention.
Write to the FCC. They should have an interest in this. It’s their turf.
What these people are doing smacks of criminal intent. Let’s see if we shine a light in some of their dark corners, if this nonsense can be stopped.
Here’s a copy of Namesecure’s abusive, rude, disingenuous reply to me;
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
E-MAIL SERVICES.
You are solely responsible for the content of your transmissions through NameSecure’s e-mail service. You agree to comply with all applicable local, state, national and international laws and regulations regarding e-mail communications and use. You agree: (a) to comply with U.S. law regarding the transmission of technical data exported from the United States through the e-mail service; (b) not to use the e-mail service for illegal purposes; and (c) not to interfere with or disrupt networks connected to the e-mail service. Without limiting the foregoing, you agree NameSecure may terminate any e-mail account, which it believes, in its sole discretion, is transmitting or is otherwise connected with any spam or other unsolicited bulk e-mail. You agree not to transmit through the e-mail service any unlawful, harassing, libelous, abusive, threatening, harmful, vulgar, obscene or otherwise objectionable material of any kind or nature. You further agree not to transmit any material that encourages conduct that could constitute a criminal offense, gives rise to civil liability or otherwise violates any applicable local, state, national or international law or regulation. Attempts to gain unauthorized access to other computer systems are prohibited. You agree not to interfere with another customer’s use and enjoyment of the e-mail service or another entity’s use and enjoyment of similar services.
You agree that NameSecure shall under no circumstances be held liable on account of any action it takes, in good faith, to restrict transmission of material that it or any user of the e-mail service considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
NameSecure reserves the right to take all legal and technical steps available to prevent unsolicited bulk e-mail or other unauthorized e-mail from being sent from or transmitted through the NameSecure Network.
Your participation in online communication or use of any NameSecure service is not edited, censored or otherwise controlled by NameSecure. However, NameSecure reserves the right to monitor content on this site and any NameSecure Services and to remove content, disable sites, or suspend or terminate services if NameSecure, in its discretion, determines such content or user practices are harmful, offensive, or otherwise in violation of this Acceptable Use Policy.
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[…] RAQ – April 1
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I too have been caught up in this whole SORBS racket. I run a small webhosting company, and one of my customers sites got hijacked due to an old version of a perl script he was running. The problem was detected and resolved almost immediately (half a day), but unfortunately not quick enough to avoid being listed on the SORBS database. However I refuse to pay the extortion fee, and instead have routed my mail through another server, since some of my customers were complaining of not being able to send mail to certain domains. Really, it’s about time this racket was shut down. As for money going to “charity”, I wonder if the charity involved is aware of the means by which they are receiving these funds – as far as I’m concerned, they won’t be getting money from me whether they’re a worthy recipient or not. Perhaps the way forward is to educate them about it, assuming they care and are not blinded by the $$$ coming in.
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Well, I’m having to deal with these A-holes now. I handle the bounced emails for a large county library system. We use a bulk email program to send overdue and holds notices to our patrons. I know nothing about server configuration and it doesn’t look like our IS department is going to do anything about it. I started getting these SORBS messages after our IS department started using Comcastbusiness last month because we needed greater bandwidth. We are a local government agency. SORBS does suck!
Sam is right this racket needs to be shut down!
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Hi fellow SORBShaters
I’m the sys admin for Friends Reunited (a popular UK website) and my hatred of SORBS know no bounds. On more than one occasion they have arbitrarily decided to list our mail server(s) as having dynamic IP addresses… As if! We send an average of a million emails a day (and have done for the past three years) – not really a good idea from some cable/dsl account! Delisting is almost impossible – it took BT a month to convince these idiots that they had got it wrong and now our main ISP (AboveNet) are having a similar bangyourheadagainstawall experience. I had no idea SORBS was trying to fleece people as well so the sooner they get shut down the better. Why not use the money they demand to hire a cyber-terrorist and ddos these fools off the net for good (only joking… or am I?)
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I think it is very interesting. I noticed that someone above mentioned hosting with NameSecure and how their email was being blocked. Now, my employees are being blocked TO namesecure because THEY use SORBS as a blocklist also. How do I get the word out to folks in charge of mail server that blocking based on sorbs is just a horrible idea? Is there nothing that can be done to get sorbs list shut down?
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I just sent a complaint to one of their upstream providers abuse address.
Subject: sorbs.net AUP Violations
Hi,
I’m writing to complain about one of your clients who may be in violation of your Acceptable Use Policy http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/about/home/aup.php
The host http://www.sorbs.net at IP 204.152.186.189 may be in violation of these terms
(General Conduct 1.)
a) Transmitting material that is unlawful
extortion: see http://www.us.sorbs.net/faq/spamdb.shtml
“Third and finally, if you are really not a spammer, or you are truly reformed, de-listing is relatively easy. You donate US$50 to a charity or
trust approved by, and not connected with, SORBS”
b) Transmitting material that is libelous or hateful.
said:
553 Dynamic IP Addresses See:
http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?xx.xx.xx.xx (in reply to RCPT TO command)
(System and Network Security 2.)
Effecting disruptions of Internet Communications. Your client may be releasing false information that prevents delivery of emails.
Please take any or all corrective actions according to AUP to stop these activities.
We have contacted the third party involved that is relying on the hateful and libelious information provided by your client thru your network.
Thanks,
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Steve, that’s a pretty interesting approach. Maybe if enough people complain upstream, their hosts will provide pressure that they will actually care about. Of course, that’s a big “maybe,” but so far nothing else has seemed to have any effect. It’s worth a shot.
Good luck!
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FUCK SORBS
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I told SBC that if those retards don’t remove me I will switch providers. I have Statics and SORBS say I have dynamics? 2 days and no email from those bastards. Anywere to complain or take legal action? those people cant’ run a business and take a week to reply to your request..:-\
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I work for a small company in Wisconsin and have had more trouble with SORBS and how they block my e-mails to my vendors. THIS IS DUMB!!! WHY??
I think my vendors would like to hear from me and how I am going to pay them money to purchase their goods.
WHY IS SORBS MAKING BUSINESS SO DIFFICULT!?!?!?!
SORBS BLOWS!!!!!
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I agree with you all, and yes SORBS still sucks.
Wisconsin here, static IP, small host normal severs dns httpd etc some specialty stuff like emergency data transmision to pagers and cell phones… yeah my bad for being a dumb ass and thinking that would work well for long with SORBS sharing space on the planet…
Listed as a dynamic IP , this was done via the IP block …even though the individual IP’s in question reverse properly and have proper TTL etc. and of course are static.
At least no one was hurt and I have taken down the whole emergency notification system as a result…
No responses, no good news.
Indeed SORBS sucks as for them being down texas way let em up here first 😉
Ohh and it seems they are under DDOS heh good.
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I agree completely. We operate a modestly successful hosting company. My first experience with SORBS was when one of our servers had its IP listed by the SORBS database. Amazingly, I was able to reach the propietor of SORBS (Matthew Sullivan) by email almost instantly. I immediately brought up the issue of how his “$50.00 donation” methodology paralells the concept of extortion. His response of course was that I couldn’t possibly be more wrong and that future replies to his email address would go to a SORBS/anti-spam newsgroup, which he implied would result my personal email addresses’ IP would be available for members of the newsgroup…. and sure enough another yokel emails me (aparantly one Sullivan’s lackeys) and informs me that he’s going to add my IP address to his block list, too. I was more amused than upset at the time.
Well after this personal interaction with SORBS, we put up a notice on our corporate site informing clients what to do if their IP got listed and I also included my own personal comments concerning Matthew Sullivan. These comments were online for roughly a year before we received a notice via Mr. Sullivan informing us that our comments were slanderous and libelous…. He completely denied any communication with me personally, denied that he listed my personal IP on his blocklist and denied including my emails to him in the newsgroup (yet I still have the original email he sent, including his own IP address AND his original posting is still in the newsgroup’s archives, so the kid isn’t very bright.) Well because we didn’t feel like getting involved in a legal dispute with Mr. Sullivan, we changed the SORBS notice) to something more politically correct and likewise substantiated our comments with a link to Wikipedia which supports the SORBS controversy and the association that SORBS is indeed considered to be an extortion racket.
I’m sure we’re not the first hosting company to receive his litigious emails, denials, and threats in an attempt to get people to remove negative comments concerning SORBS. It’s my understanding that Sullivan is currently engaged in making SORBS more commercially-oriented and is cooperating with several Australian IT companies… all of whom stand to lose a lot if people continue to grumble, complain, and come to the realization that SORBS really creates more harm than good, and that the founder’s judgment is just a little off-kilter.
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I operate one of the most aggressively anti-spam IPS’s in the US. We have a zero spam tolerance and generally shut down accounts that are being exploited by spammers (or, far more rarely, accounts that are being deliberately used to spam) within minutes, or, at most, hours. Because of our aggressive anti-spam stance and tools, we had not even heard of SORBS until we had been in business for 9 years. A spammer took over a client’s PC for a grand total of 45 minutes, at which point we shut them down. Apparently one of the spammer’s emails got relayed to a spamtrap address that is feeding SORBS RBL. That was enough to get our servers blacklisted. Once I found out about SORBS pathetic extortion racket, I refused to pay them, and, instead have gone on a campaign with all recipient servers that are using SORBS, as I encounter them. If SORBS intent was to just block spam, they would routinely remove “stale” entries from their database (as other reliable RBL’s do) and/or provide a free link to appeal the block. In short, any system administrator who relies upon SORBS knowing how they operate, is mentally challenged.
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My ISP uses SORBS. It’s very evident to me SORBS is broken and anyone who uses it after reading all there is on the web regarding it, lack a major clue. It’s unfortunate.. but I guess time will tell, won’t it? In the mean time, stay away from SORBS.
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I own a plumbing company and page the service calls via a third party software through the internet. For the past month I haven’t been able to page the calls because of this SORBS issue. I can’t seem to get help from anybody about this. The BS emails I receive are from a “Robot”. Is there anybody out there who can help me. I know plumbing…I don’t know IP issues so this is an ongoing nightmare for me!
WHY has this company not been shut down if this EXTORTION is going on? Anybody up for a class action lawsuit? PLEASE let me know. I’m first in line!
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We are a non profit Presbyterian church in Berkeley Ca. We have our own exchange server and we only send out our information email to people on our membership list but that seemed to be enough to get one of our DNS addresses listed on SORBS.
I have two ticket ID numbers for delisting with them that was sent to me in an automatic response email and I have not even gotten far enough in their system where they are trying to bribe me with a donation yet.
My question is …. Has anyone managed to get delisted form SORBS without having to make their donation ? If so … How did you do it ?
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I can’t believe that people use Sorbs to blacklist. I hope people wise up and start ignoring these obvious extortionists.
SORB sucks. What a stupid business model. They cause grief to innocents on the pretext of performing good. Don’t they realize how many people use shared servers? Stupid piece of crap company.
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A year ago we were falsely accused of being a spammer. Our hosting company (datapipe.com) agreeing that we had a sterling reputation, and moved us to another mail server. No problem for a year. Now SORBS comes back to datapipe holding their original mail server hostage. Datapipe has yielded to the kidnapping and will keep us on board for as long as they can, we are forced to look for another host. No due process, no way to defend. Very unAmerican. Anyone that can help a small company defend itself would be appreciated.
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I have been quite surprised that SORBS included a net block like 87.23.0.0-87.23.63.255 in their DUL. Such a subnetwork does not exist at RIPE, who reports a larger 87.0.0.0-87.31.255.255 assigned to Telecom Italia Net. The addition on SORBS is dated November 11 2006, I don’t think the subnetting has been changed more recently because I know of one address that has been in use before. The blocked range includes ip address of both “static” and “dynamic” tags, according with Matthew Sullivan’s proposed rDNS naming scheme. (I have requested de-listing of a “static” address, and after 48 hours nothing has happened.)
I’d be really curious to know how that block has been added in the first place. How did they pick up that otherwise unexisting range? Dices?
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I have previously used SORBS, but this was probably before this extortion scheme. I had numerous problems trying to get IP addresses de-listed but there attitude was pretty much they didn’t give a shit that legitimate emails were being blocked or mis marked as spam.
Needless to say in any email system I administered I removed SORBS simply because the false positive rate was horrendous.
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They really need to go. They now have google mail servers on their blacklist. Anyone that uses gmail can’t send messages to recipients whose ISP uses their lists. What am I as a user supposed to do about this? I am not an IT professional, but I do manage a few mailing lists for some non-profits. We use the lists as a way to communicate with each other (i.e. online board meetings, etc). Worse yet, the SORBS error message we get says the message to “ourlistname@ourdomain.com” has been rejected, but doesn’t indicate which member or members of the list didn’t receive the message. As for their website, I have never seen a more arrogant attitude. I think the two pronged attack should do: (1) Notify the charities of what is going on and (2) get every ISP in the country to stop using them.
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Sorbs is a scam.
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Update! Not satisfied with GMAIL, Verizon DSL email servers are now on their list
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We have had exactly the same problem as a hosting client. I feel extortion is the only word. Im not sure this is even legal.
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Important fact to note here guys; SORBS lists an IP address, not a person, business or location. If your IP address is listed, find you why.
I had my server IP listed, I looked up why, found it was backscatter from another person’s virus infection, emailed SORBS and Hey Presto! I was unlisted.
If it’s a valid Reason, Matt will unlist you. If you try to bully him, well, I guess you get what you pay for ($50 worth in this case).
I run SORBS on my servers, and I’ve noticed a marked decrease in pr0n spams coming in, and with a little bit of work, I can allow in the servers that SORBS blocks until they get delisted.
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My hosting provider (and by extension their customers, including me) have run into problems with SORBS recently as well. SORBS helpfully added two entire /17 blocks (65,000 addresses total) to their dial-up list merely on the basis of their rDNS entries, despite the fact that all of those addresses are used for static, dedicated hosting accounts.
SORBS should be shut down, and any ISP stupid enough to use them should be boycotted.
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Matthew Sullivan uses SORBS to push his own RFC for how he beleives rDNS should be configured. Its the sign of an insecure geek trying to “make his mark” on the internet.
One day, he will have his fingers broken by a helpfull Aussie – I am quite sure of it.
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Three years later from the original post and Sorbs still sucks. I’m filling in as the temp-postmaster and am blinded by anger after reading their policy to de-list. Who are these people anyways? Were they elected or
are they just a group of jerks who decided to print their own money? I suggested a worthy charity that I would like to donate the money to and am very eager to see their response.
I swear on this day to boycott any Sorbs service and will insist to any employer/peer that they adopt the same practice. We really need a grass-root movement to protest Sorbs and get them out of blacklisting space, permanently.
also, sorbssucks.com is available.
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My happy little web/mail server got bitch-slapped by SORBS this week. Because I set up names for each client’s mail server use (e.g. mail.theirdomain.com), and the reverse DNS provided by my upstream provider (Cox) resolves to mail.mydomain.com, SORBS will not even respond to me.
Funny thing is, I discovered the blacklisting because my ASSP spam filter is screwed down so tight that I told it to dump messages from domains turning up on even one RBL.
SORBS was in the ASSP RBL list by default. After reading up on SORBS, I’ve removed them. My server isn’t a money-making operation. Nearly every domain on it is a charitable organization.
I’ll not submit to extortion by SORBS. What I will do is contact the authors of ASSP and offer them a substantial amount of money to remove SORBS from their default configuration. I daresay a lot of people are using SORBS without even thinking about it. I was, but I won’t make that mistake again.
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I suddenly discovered many friends could no longer receive my e-mails. The daemon mailer failure message said I had been blacklisted for spam by SORBS. I looked into it, (they had given the date and time of the “offense”) and it was an e-mail with a pdf attachment I had sent to guy who wanted to see my greatgrandfather’s military papers. It turned out that he downloaded the file then went to delete the e-mail and accidently hit spam instead. I didn’t pay their fine. I explained the issue to them and that I would not pay their extortion and cc’d my state attorney general on the email. He was kind enough to e-mail me (and SORBS) back that since this crossed state lines maybe it should be looked into under federal racketeering laws. I didn’t pay a fine, am no longer blacklisted, and had a good laugh at SORBS’ expense.
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