Big story in industry circles: a long-running dispute between two spam-fighting organisations has developed into all-out war after one of them shut down operations.ORBS (Open Relay Behaviour-modification System) shut down its list of spam-friendly ‘open relays’ earlier this week because it claims its rival organization, MAPS (Mail Abuse Preve tion System), had influenced a major ISP to drop ORBS into an ‘Internet black hole’ - a way of listing spammy relays so that the stuff can’t get through to ISPs. Let’s rewind. The disagreement began last year, when Paul Vixie, chairman of MAPS, lost his temper over ORBS probing of the MAPS network and placed ORBS on the blackhole list. Although he quickly cooled off took them off again, ORBS retaliated by listing MAPS’s main server on its list of open relays. It also thought better of this pretty quickly, removing the listing a day later.More recently, Above.net, a major bandwidth provider, blocked ORBS’s open-relay probes - not an insignificant action when you consider the principals of MAPS are both executives at Above.net. ORBS claims that Above.net is also discarding all traffic intended for ORBS at exchange points in London and Austria - a practice which Paul Vixie has apparently confirmed. In consequence, ORBS has taken offline its DNS zone file, the resource by which ISPs identify spam to block.ORBS is claiming that MAPS wants to shut down its competing free service, and hints darkly that MAPS plans to begin charging for its own services. MAPS’ Paul Vixie strongly denies this. It’s a MAPS/ORBS melee:  tbtf.com/resource.maps-orbs.html