Ok, so what does the initialism (it is likely that rather than an acronym)
ORBS stand for?  Do its "blacklists" have any official standing? If so,
why?  How does one check to see whom it has blacklisted?

I was a big spam fighter back in the BITNET days.  BITNET had an official
rule banning *all* commercial use, and almost all Internet access was from
.mil, .gov or .edu and there was a gentleman's agreement that there would
be no commercial advertising.  At that time spammers hacked their way in,
used student accounts at .edu sites (sometimes not their own), etc.  All
the spam came from people who had no legitimate access, or violated their
use agreements, so there was a reason to vigorously get after them.  These
days, since the Internet has been openned to commercial use, a great many
are conducting 'spam' business as legitimate as those who clog my mailbox
with physical junk mail (I will grant you there are still those who try to
hide where they are coming from but the attempts are generally pretty
feeple, easy to track).

When SPAM-L was started, when Eric and Nathan asked that the excess spam
stuff be moved from LSTOWN-L, I was a charter subscriber.  I never said
much, but tried to keep up with it.  When the traffic got to be too much,
and the tone became too militant for my taste, I dropped it (years ago).

Spam that comes to me persaonally, well, I can spot it 9 out of 10 from
the mail index and delete without opening (like throughing everying with
bulk rate postage in the trash can without looking at it, except I don't
send it to the landfill nor have to cart it to the recycle dump).  Spam
that comes to my lists, well, if they ain't subscribed it comes to me
for approval; if they have subbed to spam they are auto on REVIEW and
it comes me for approval.  I simply do not approve the junk; legit
subscribers can post freely but no one ever sees any spam on the lists,
nor viruses, which is what I really care about.

I'm not sure I like the idea of an oranization blacklisting an entire site
because the organization thinks the site is "soft" on spam (I don't know
that that is what ORBS does, but I sorta get that impression).

Someone said something about an "ad hominem" attack.  I don't recall that
it was that.  In an ad hominem one tries to refute what a person says by
attacking the "person"  rather than refuting what was said. Who the person
is has no bearing on what he said, so attacking the person does not refute
what he said; you have an ad hominem logicorhetorical fallacy.

Douglas