There seems to be a lot of drama surrounding the shutdown of ORDB spam blacklist. Here is why this is a non-event: Open relays no longer significantly contribute to the amount of spam.

Few years ago, this was not the case. Few years ago, before the patching systems were in place, before security meant much, before mail systems would cease to function at very high loads… people would compromise mail servers and use them to relay SPAM. However, with the security advances we’ve had over the past few years, the “open relay” either by misconfiguration or total system compromise has become a thing of the past.

Looking over the daily ExchangeDefender report, the leading source of spam is the OCR/GIF Spam with 21.60% of inbound mail. In general, we estimate over 60% of all inbound spam is generated through the botnets of compromised systems.

So yes, ORDB is dead. May it rest in peace, it’s saved a lot of us a lot of grief.

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