As some of you may know,  ORDB.org (aka the Open Relay Data Base) was one of the original real time or IP based black lists. The idea was that as your mail server or anti-spam service (like CudaMail) was getting a connection from a sending mail server you could ask ORDB.org if the senders IP address was known to ORDB and if it was you had a pretty good idea that you didn't want to accept this e-mail as it was most likely spam being routed through an open relay mail server.
 
Well after running as a free service for years the ORDB.org service was shut down on December 18, 2006 and instead of replying it would just time out.  Not a big deal and since your mail server didn't get a reply either way you went on to other tests. They announced that they were going off-line and at some time in the future they would be replying with a positive result to any new queries. This has happened many times over the years with various free anti-spam databases for a variety of reasons. Most administrators didn't notice the ORDB.org announcement or put the removal of this test on their 'to do' list and promptly forgot about it until now.
 
So on March 25, 2008, after giving fair warning, the DNS servers for ORDB.org started to answer every query with a positive result. All mail servers still using a SPAM filtering solution that references ORDB (relays.ordb.org) started to immediately block all incoming e-mails regardless of their real status as spam sources. You can't blame the admin of ORDB.org as they were doing this service for free and had been paying for the bandwidth used up by all these timed out queries for the last 2 years.
 
While the CudaMail system does still use some of the no charge databases out there to block spam it does not use ORDB.org. Barracuda Central has also been actively working on their own internal reputation system. The Barracuda Reputation system is very mature at this point with the end result is that this database is flagging new spam sources before the no charge databases like ORDB.org used to do. The real benefit of Barracuda Central maintaining this database is that there are dedicated people paid to maintain it as part of their business plan and the problems experienced by people who rely on the free databases will not happen to CudaMail.

Now go have a nice spam free day!

- Shaun Sturby