Commercial DNS blacklists such as MAPS (see http://mail-abuse.org) may provide a suitable compromise. The chances of a commercial blacklist going under without any warnings are slim compared to free services such as those provided by OsiruSoft. Although you may be hesitant to start paying for what has traditionally been a free service, remember, there's always someone to yell at when things go wrong if you're paying a monthly bill.

As we try and deal the current onslaught of threats to our mail systems we have to take the death of this once truly useful tool in stride. Hopefully the coming weeks won't be as fraught with peril for mail administrators.

Daniel Koffler is an R6 CLP and works as a Domino consultant for major organizations in North America and Europe, specializing in network design, security analysis and knowledge management, he is also the author of several OpenSource projects. Daniel can be reached at dkoffler@users.sourceforge.net.