CYBERSPACE — Like a scene out of a modern techno-thriller, on Tuesday at noon EST email began bouncing all over the Web as a long-gone spam blacklist arose from the dead.The Open Relay Database (ORDB.org), an anti-spam service commonly employed on email servers worldwide, was reactivated late Monday. Evidently, creator Andrew Johnson and his crew wanted to jab sleeping users in the virtual ribs with the message, “Hey! We told you we were through, and we meant it!” The net effect: All mail was blocked on servers still configured to query ORDB’s lists of known spam sources. False-positives precipitated by long-dead code embedded in mail server’s settings snarled some traffic for most of the week, frustrating almost everyone and leaving many scratching their heads about why suddenly their messages were refused delivery.

When ORDB returned to life, it blacklisted the entire world, thereby preventing any email from reaching its destination on servers still configured to query ORDB’s lists. The problem was compounded by some system administrators having forgotten they installed the ORDB code in the first place. Admins who inherited legacy systems weren’t aware it was part of their spam loops.

Created by Andrew Johnson in mid-2001, ORDB ceased to exist December 18th, 2006.

“It’s been a case of a long goodbye, as very little work has gone into maintaining ORDB for a while,” a notice on the website said at the time. “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 [remote blacklists] 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.”

There is a fix, according to Matt at Axxxcess.net.

“To fix it, you need to go to Exchange System Manager/Global Settings/Message Delivery Properties/Connection Filtering and remove ORDB from the Block List Service,” he wrote in a posting on YNOT’s webmaster forum.