[ORDB-ANNOUNCE] Happy holidays from ORDB.org

Dear carbon-based lifeform,

The holidays are a time of sharing and happiness. We wish to spend a few
minutes explaining our hopes and wishes for the future. Well, *some* of
our hopes. This is a family show after all.

Given the outcome of several court cases in recent time, we remain
hopeful that spam can become less of a problem. Slowly, the community at
large has begun sending a clear signal to companies that run their
business by placing the cost of advertising directly on the target
audience. 

We must remain vigilant, however. As anti-spam measures improve, the
general user will receive smaller amounts of spam, thinking the problem
has gone away. More lax legislation is being introduced in various
countries or is on the horizon. We cannot stress strongly enough that
fighting spam via technology is NOT the answer. We urge you to yet again
raise the issue of good marketing laws with your government
representative.

Unfortunately, misguided individuals are working actively to put a stop
to services such as ORDB, as well as lobbying for legislation to prevent
users from making the decision from whom you wish to receive email. At
least one of these individuals is actually running an open relay and
inviting other operators of open mail relays to sue ORDB and similar
services.

We ask that you pray that these individuals find the right path before
we have to waste time with lawsuits.

Speaking of wasting time: Some of you waste our time by submitting
thousands and thousands of hosts for test, causing an overload of our
database. We just removed 100.000 thousands fake entries in our testing
queue and firewalled off the offending host. Please stop. The log
messages are bothering us. You know who you are.

Last but not least, we are still in need of translators to help us
complete the international feel of ORDB.org. Feel free to get in touch if
you can find the time.

This weekend, the largest assembly of ORDB staff ever is taking place. 21
individuals have gathered for beer and improving ORDB. We hope to
continue our service in the new year, and thank you all for the support
you have shown.

And finally - if you appreciate the efforts of ORDB.org, please take a few
minutes to visit http://ordb.org/donate/.

This is how we use donations: 
- For hardware and the increasing demand for bandwith. E.g. to keep the
service running at optimal performance. 
- To establish a kind of buffer against future lawsuits. ORDB.org is
threathened by lawsuits on a daily basis.
- To maintain motivation to deal with the hundreds of support-emails
ORDB.org receives every day. Our goal is to assist in closing as many open
relays as possible, but our volunteer supporters are able to handle only a
limited amount of emails pr. day.

Happy holidays to all. Thanks for listening.
ORDB.org

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