The email RBL service at sorbs.net seems to be having issues.  Christopher alerted us to the issue yesterday around 4pm EST - his servers were blocking all inbound mail from google and yahoo based on the sorbs database.  At the time we ran  a few queries, it seemed to be more of a database problem than an actual blocklist entry.  Since then it seems to have gotten worse, the main sorbs.net website is down as well. 

Two points:

1/ Tactically, if you are using sorbs.net to filter your email, you probably will want to temporarily modify your configs until they are back and in good health

2/ Strategically, putting all your eggs in one basket for anything in IT is not great.  Always architect core services so that they'll work if one component or another fails - everything breaks sometime, that's just life in IT.  Personally, I don't put a lot of faith in RBL services, but if I do use them for a client, normally I'll configure several of them (or at least 2), or even better, use the input from the RBL as only one factor in the "is it spam?" question that we need to ask for every inbound email. 

************** UPDATE ******************

It looks like this service was under a DDOS attack, they expect to be fully back in a few hours (as of 2:45-ish EST)

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=============== Rob VandenBrink Metafore ===================