[WEB4LIB] RE: ORBS (was: Blocking email, the complaint)

[Mike Novak]

>The very brief version is that ORBS was hosted in NZ. Two companies

I had some first hand experience with ORBS a while back -- when I first came
to my current position, I moved from a Novell world to an NT world.  I
received e-mail from ORBS notifying me that we had an open relay, which I
was able to close.  We're running IMS for our handful of e-mail accounts, by
the way.  The bottom line is, they helped me out, they responded very
quickly when the whole was patched, and were professional the whole way.

That being said, however, what immediately occurred to me was the fact that
there database is in fact an open invitation to spammers -- need an open
relay?  Check the ORBS database!  So it is a bit of a strong arm tactic,
almost akin to blackmail:  close your relay or we're going to publish it for
all spammers on the net!   I don't believe this was actually the intention
or philosophy of the ORBS people, but by design it seemed to work out this
way.

Mike Novak
Technology Coordinator & Reference Librarian
University City Public Library