Blacklist SORBS Shutting Down very soon

SORBS is a blacklist service based in Australia. The University of Queensland that sponsors SORBS hosting no longer wants to renew the contract, so on July 21st, SORBS is scheduled to be shutdown.

Anti-spam movement was quite chattery right after the announcement. One can see a flurry of posts on Twitter under search word SORBS.

SORBS has been in operation since 2002 so that amount of time as a DNSBL is long. Many DNSBLs come and go because they are largely a volunteer effort that can run quickly into trouble (legal threats, expensive hosting, research intensive).

Just a few days ago around June 23rd, SORBS owner and operator, Michelle Sullivan announced the shutdown on Spam mailing lists, NANAE and on her homepage of her website.

Then the SORBS announcement was picked up by Slashdot, and after just reading a handful of comments, you could tell that SORBS was not going to be missed by many based on some of the negative posts there. It was almost like the diatribes from NANAE moved over to Slashdot for the day. In fact, that probably is what it was. NANAE used to be the online hangout for a small group of anti-spammers, but as time has marched on, anti-spammers, and the such have moved on to either web forums such as Inbox Revenge, open and closed mailing lists, such as SPAM-L or other outlets to share information on battling spam.

In times past, I used to deal with SORBS at my job. They were the most difficult list to deal with from what I recall. So I personally won't miss them.

Further recommended blog posts about the recent SORBS imminent shutdown which provide more detail than is in this particular post:
Al Iverson Spamresource - "SORBS Information Roundup"

InBoxRevenge Forum - "Blacklist service SORBS shutting down in July 2009"