In case you have not yet heard; the open relay database ‘ordb.org’ is now officially offline. For five and a half years the ORDB volunteers maintained a comprehensive list of known open relays. ORDB.org posted the following notice on their website that is now no longer:

“It’s been a case of a long goodbye as very little work has gone into maintaining ORDB for a while. Our volunteer staff has been pre-occupied with other aspects of their lives. In addition, the general consensus within the team is that open relay RBLs are no longer the most effective way of preventing spam from entering your network as spammers have changed tactics in recent years, as have the anti-spam community.”

Whether you used their list or not, it is always sad to say goodbye to a good spam fighting effort.

If you were using ORDB.org to check for spam, it is highly advisable to disable the list in your spam filtering software.