The realtime blackhole list (RBL) provides an inventory of sites that either produce spam or do not adequately prevent their users from producing it - enabling mail server administrators to use the lists to block unsolicited email.
Instead users will have to fork out for a subscription contract with MAPS and in most cases pay a subscription fee.
"MAPS has been the single leading non-government effort at controlling the spam problem, and has largely worked because of the 'big stick' it carries of cutting the spammer or spam-friendly ISP off from large portions of the Internet," Troy Rollo of the Coalition against Unsolicited Bulk Email, told ZDNet.
MAPS has played a large part in persuading ISPs to adopt policies to deal with spam, according to Rollo.
"With MAPS moving to a subscription only basis, we can expect two results -- users at sites that can't or won't pay the subscription fee will see more spam, and the 'big stick' may no longer be sufficient to deter irresponsible ISPs from allowing their customers to spam."
The affected services are the MAPS RBL (realtime blackhole list), the MAPS RSS (relay spam stopper), and the MAPS DUL (Dialup list).
A message from MAPS says: "Effective Midnight 7/31/2001, all non-subscription access to MAPS services will cease. Anyone wishing to transfer or query MAPS data must have a signed contract with MAPS, and have access enabled in our ACL".
MAPs claims that the economic conditions in the industry are in part to blame for its move to a subscription service.
-MAPS' purpose is to stop spam on the Internet. That purpose can only be achieved as long as MAPS can maintain itself as a corporation. Like any corporation, that takes income. There is very little debate about the effectiveness of the MAPS lists. This effectiveness saves its users time, bandwidth and other resources as well as giving them an added value to their customers by reducing the amount of spam the customer sees in their inbox. MAPS can simply no longer afford to foot the bill for the bulk of the Internet community."
MAPs said it will offer some reduced fee or free query contracts under limited circumstances for individual or hobby sites.
