I had to write this ticket in english to reach the maximum of population. I hope my friends will understand my choice.
What is SORBS?
SORBS is supposed to be a legitimate anti-spam filter that companies use to reduce the spam in their mailboxes. It’s a 3rd party which provide a list of blacklisted IP’s (yes, i really said IP’s, not “domain name”) to their customers.
Why the hell i’ve been blacklisted by SORBS?
Welcome to the club! You have been blacklisted without any reason and SORBS refuse to unlist your IP’s. The chances that YOU are spamming is really low if your computers are secured (free of viruses). You are probably hosting your web site & emails outside your own domain (using services like 1&1, Videotron, Bell, etc!). These companies doesn’t have 1 mail server per customer, it would be insane and not cost efficient. So they host hundreds & thousands of customers on a single mail server and this server got 1 IP. Someone arround you, on that same server is probably spamming and got your mail server blacklisted. Your ISP can’t do much for that: Once you advise them of the situation, they investigate and ban this customer from their servers.
How do i delist from SORBS?
Good luck! You will probably not be able to delist your mail server.
- You need to be sure the spammer have been irradicated from your server.
- Your going to have to register to SORBS web site to delist your server, and chances are that you won’t even be able to register to their web site
- If you are hosting your stuff on a major provider like 1&1 (they got servers all over the world!), maybe its time for you to pray, because after appearing 5 times in the blacklist, SORBS refuse to delist your server! So talk to God, not to SORBS because they won’t listen to you.
How to register to SORBS?
Their web site have serious problems. You first try to register, and you get an email with a link & authorization code. Once you got it, you click on the link, fill your user name and password to confirm your registration, and what? FAILURE! You just discover that you can’t register because of some scripting error on their web page. You try, again and again, it doesn’t work. Few days later, you try again, and it still doesn’t work!
You desperately try to find an email address or phone number to call them. Good luck again! You won’t find any other than “privacy@sorbs.net”, which lead to their lawyer (not really useful).
What are the rights of SORBS?
Apparently, they give themselves all the rights that they want! This part is taken from their web site:
SORBS has a right, and an obligation, to publish truthful information. SORBS strives to ensure all the information is accurate and will correct any errors as soon as possible after being notified of errors. Listings that are truthful, that are old or not be current, are not errors. This means if an IP is listed as previously sending spam, the fact it does not currently send spam does not imply the listing is an error.
So as i do have the right, and obligation, to publish this article to warn people of SORBS power trip. As they also say, “To our American friends, the First Amendment does not apply outside of the USA, and even if it did, it would not be applicable”. So, for not beeing in USA, it give them the right to piss on people… huh!
Why we shouldn’t use SORBS?
Well, it’s easy to understand. Large companies usually host their server at home, but smaller companies (like 90% of the companies in Québec) use a less expensive method of hosting: they use 3rd party provider with shared ressources. There is some “Dedicated Servers” from 3rd party provider, but they are usually expensive. It can cost easily 300$ / month for a single server. Every IT know that usually you need multiples servers because it’s not a good idea to put an SQL Server on a server which is used for HTTP hosting for some security reasons. Same for Email server. So basically, companies need to host 3 servers, and that mean 600-900$/months of hosting. Having 3 servers at home is expensive too, because people need to think about their servers protection & capacities (Firewalls, Server Racks, UPS’s, Bandwidth, etc!) So Shared Hosting is often used for small/medium size companies.
Blacklisting a specific domain name is easy to do. Of course, it’s less efficient because it’s easy for anyone to get a new domain name. So people could spam under another domain name. But with the large number of customers, sites like SORBS can afford that because people report spams as soon as they get it.
There’s also few other method of blacklisting which are efficient, and it doesn’t penalise other users. Thanks to Wikipedia, here’s an article giving a lot of anti-spam techniques.
SORBS also put all the blame on the hosting providers, which is partially true. A provider like 1&1 (having millions of customers) can’t hire people to check at people activities all the time. They use software to detect massive activities, but that’s the best that they can do. And even there, those “massive activities” might be legitimate! So as long as they don’t receive any complaint for a specific customer, they can’t do much. As soon as they get complaints, they investigate and take proper action against this customer. I’m not saying that all the ISP’s are respectful: This is true, there’s some asshole ISP’s (like in Belieze) who offer the paradise for those spammers. Those companies can be blacklisted without any problem, but SORBS should at least make that little effort to talk to the ISP to solve this problem, to see if the ISP is a responsible company or not. (that’s relatively easy to do… i’ve tacked down few spammers by talking to their ISP’s, and some others clearly tell me: “FU, we don’t care what you have to say” even if you tell them that it’s mentionned in their TOS (Term of Services) that their customers can’t use their servers for spamming). You get to know very easily who is a serious ISP and who is not 
with a minimum of effort!
Another reason to not use SORBS is that they don’t have any efficient way to communicate with them. No phone number, no email, no “human answer” when you use their email form. You can’t even register to their web site to get unlisted (that should be solved, SOMEDAY! But when your company need to get unlisted ASAP because your email can’t reach your customers, it’s a serious problem!). They should also spend 50$ per year to get a REAL SSL CERTIFICATE! They want to keep it low cust, but an SSL Certificate just cost 50$… it can’t be more affordable! To my eyes, that doesn’t look serious and profesionnal.
Conclusion
Giving so much power to a single man can often lead to some power trip, and that seems to be the case for SORBS. The choice is your, but would you like to get trashed because your neighbor is an asshole? I don’t!
