RE: vger rejecting messages from mediaone

[David Schwartz]

> I can see ORBS's point of view; when someone reports an abused mail
> relay at one of roadrunner's customers, ORBS now has no way of
> checking to see if that mail relay is in fact open.

	ORBS was supposed to be a list of CONFIRMED OPEN mail relays. Apparently,
they have changed their mission without telling anyone. Their web page,
"What is ORBS?" says:

"What is ORBS?
The short answer: ORBS is a validated database of open mail relays and open
mail relay output points, accessable via DNS lookup.

ORBS, or the Open Relay Behaviour-modification System, is a database for
tracking SMTP servers that have been confirmed to permit third-party relay.
These servers permit spammers to connect to them from anywhere in the world,
usually from a modem connection, and then forward the spam to its intended
victims.

ORBS is NOT a "black hole" - we do not disseminate routing information
causing included hosts to be unreachable from portions of the Internet.

ORBS tracks these systems so that people operating mailservers subscribed to
our database can block e-mail coming from open relays until such time as
they are fixed to no longer permit third-party SMTP relay."

	DS