[cobalt-users] Off-topic, Mail Server / ORBS Discovery

["Steven Werby" <steven-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This morning I discovered that the Bell Atlantic mail server I use as a Bell
Atlantic ADSL customer has been blackholed by ORBS (www.orbs.org). If all of
BA's mail server's have been blackholed it means all BA internet customers will
soon find they are unable to email much of the internet. I've informed BA tech
support, so we'll see what happens (I got a $22.56 credit b/c they "think" it
may take as long as 14 days to fix).

For those of you not familiar with ORBS, ORBS looks for insecure email servers
across the internet.  It does its own searches and people submit servers to be
tested and then it puts them through a battery of tests to see if they are
secure. If it's found to be insecure the owner is given 30 days to correct the
problem before the server is added to the public ORBS list. Many companies and
websites block email from servers in the ORBS list b/c insecure mail servers are
used by spammers to send milions of spam emails per day. To find out more check
out the site. To verify that my BA mail server is blackholed go to
http://www.orbs.org/verify_1.html and enter 199.45.39.157 as the IP address to
lookup.

I know this was off-topic, but a quick scan of Jeff Lasman's personal archive
should show that my signal to noise ratio is pretty good.  Plus, it should make
you all feel better to know that you are much smarter than $79 billion Bell
Atlantic!

And if you see this it seems that Cobalt does not use the ORBS database!

Steven Werby {steven-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx}