I just forwarded an email from work to home and it was immediately returned with the following error:
550 Rejected by ORDB
My first thought was that our company had been blacklisted as a spammer! The mail server I was sending to is hMailServer – a mail server I am running on a computer at home for my personal domain. It works wonderfully and I’ve never had a problem with it. In fact, it works so well, that I haven’t even touched it since installing it over a year ago, so I figured that the 550 error couldn’t possibly be anything to do with me…
Well, as it turns out, Slashdot is running an article about this very issue. Apparently, the ORDB (Open Relay Database) shut down a while ago, and is now returning false positives. This is their way of letting people (like me) know that they need to reconfigure their mail servers and remove the ORDB from their anti-spam lists.
So if you’re still using ORDB to check for spammers, you should remove it from your mail server settings as soon as possible.
6 responses so far ↓
IntegrityDC // March 26, 2008 at 10:58 am |
Ah yes! Thanks for the post. Seems that I had overlooked removing ORDB on my server. Your post helped me out. Thanks!
crees // March 27, 2008 at 9:02 am |
thanks for the info, fixed our hmail server.
Joksi // April 3, 2008 at 3:09 am |
Im also a HmailServer user, and I noticed the same thing today when I was accidentally sending a mail from one external account to one of my accounts on my server. I got the same message back!
Did a search on Google for “Rejected by ORDB” and among the first hits I found your blog entry, nice, it solved my problem!
ORDB - Gone But Not Forgotten « Avoiding the Chasm // April 8, 2008 at 1:45 am |
[...] the load on their servers if they decide to re-open in some form. Looking through online forums and blog posts it is clear that plenty of people are experiencing the results of this [...]
ron // April 23, 2008 at 10:05 pm |
Same as the others. Just reinstalled an old test server I hadn’t used in about a year and during the process sent some test mails to it. Returned with the same error. Searched yahoo, found this post.
The short of it is you saved me hours of frustration. Thanks!!
carlos // July 19, 2008 at 3:42 am |
okay.. off topic this one but:
how did you get wordpress to work with hMailServer?
cheers