We received word (thanks, Jeremy!) that the SATOS blacklist is defunct. Although we did not receive word of this from the blacklist owner when they first shut it down, the blacklist has been returning false positives in order to capture the attention of anyone still using the blacklist.
SATOS has therefore been removed from our blacklist lookup tool.
The research is in, and the word is that email and social media work better together than either one does independently. So much so, that Constant Contact is now offering a guarantee on this. Check it out here.
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Today, Matt Cutts (Head of Google Webspam team) announced improvements to Google’s spam reporting form, saying via Twitter: “We just released the biggest refresh of our spam report form in, oh, say 10 years”: http://t.co/ty2MxmN
There are a lot of forms for reporting various types of webspam to Google now. Hopefully these tools will help to reduce the amount of webspam out there, and with Google’s excellent track record, we should see some good results.
We’ll assume that any reports that are made receive human review before blacklisting/filtering, so that false reports (e.g. competitive harassment) are quickly culled. If your company experiences unjustified filtering (as judged by industry-sanctioned practices) by any of the new web filtering tools in practice today, however, we’d like to know about it. We, like most of you, would like to see spam filtering perfected to the point that true spam is filtered but legitimate email and web traffic is not filtered.
We’ve received inquiries from customers who have used our Email Blacklist Tool to check their IP address and found it clean, except for the FIVETENFREE lookup. If this happens to you, our response depends on your answer to the following question: did this email blacklist cause you to have rejected email, or are you just being proactive?
The reason we ask this is that the FIVETENFREE email blacklist has been known to produce a relatively high percentage of false positives.
For example, my personal IP, given to my computer dynamically, is on their blacklist.
Here’s what their site says when I run the test on my current personal computer IP:
“misc.spam. If you are not running a mail server on (X), this listing should not affect you in any way, and you should ignore whatever source told you that this might be a problem.
The misc.spam group is mostly (but not entirely) composed of entire addresses blocks that have a) sent spam here, b) have consecutive or missing reverse dns, and c) have no customer sub-delegation via either the controlling RIR (ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, APNIC, etc) or an rwhois server referenced in the main RIR records.”
So, the problem ends up being my IP address reverse-DNS doesn’t correspond to my domain name, and they also don’t like the TTL for my A record. Of course, none of this is under my control, it is controlled by my ISP.
So, as they suggest on their own site, I should ignore this.
We suggest you do the same unless it is causing email problems. To go to their site directly to test your own IP, and find out why it’s listed, go to: http://www.five-ten-sg.com/mapper
The cluecentral blacklist is no more, as you can tell by following the link to their website. This blacklist caused a bit of confusion in the last year, as it has been returning results that are probably from one of the last versions of the list, which may or may not include an individual IP on the blacklist. We believe the list has more or less been inactive (in terms of updates) since October of 2009. As a result, we will be removing cluecentral.net from our lookup tool in the next release. Phew, one less email blacklist to worry about!
The fact that you are reading this site indicates that you have either experienced a problem with, or know something about, email blacklists. But did you know that malware can be installed on your website that causes browsers to blacklist your website? It’s not always obvious when this malware is installed, but it could be costing your business money and reputation when it goes undetected.
Search engines and browsers, led by Google and Firefox, now regularly blacklist thousands of legitimate websites each day that get infected with malware. Sites that get blacklisted lose most of their traffic from Google and Firefox and incur significant revenue and brand losses.
As a result, it’s a good idea to check your site on a regular basis for browser blacklisting, in addition to email blacklisting. We’ve spent the last year testing one such solution, that offers a free component as well as a premium testing service. (ALL of our recommended solutions go through extensive testing before making it to our recommended list.)
Together with Dasient (a company started by ex-Googlers), we are offering a service to help our customers stay off browser blacklists. This new premium security service will monitor your web site and alert you if your site is ever infected with malware that could cause your site to get blacklisted. Check out our premium malware monitoring solution.
Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback, and we look forward to helping support and enable your web properties and businesses!
Thanks!
Rob
Global eBusiness Solutions
We’ve been informed that the JAMM DNSBL is out of service. If your IP is showing as blacklisted on this service, it’s likely due to the common practice of blacklisting all inquiring IPs when a service is discontinued. This practice is done to get the attention of administrators who are still using the blacklist, so that they discontinue use as soon as possible. The official notice is here:
JAMM Consulting Blacklist
The JAMMDNSBL has been removed from our lookup tool.
Just an update to a previous forum post:
RedHawk has indicated that they are going to release access to their access.redhawk.org blacklist with their “soon to be released” SpamHawk product. They indicate that they are again collecting information from their SPAM database, as of November 2008.
For more information, please see their SpamHawk page at:
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Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 1:00 pm
Received an email today noting that the link to Redhawk didn’t work anymore. So we did a bit of investigating, and found something is indeed up with the site. Redhawk.org appears to have a lot of broken links right now, including the http://access.redhawk.org/ link, which we believe is supposed to be their main link.
You can see the main page for their spam tool at:
http://www.redhawk.org/index.php/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,43/
But the hidden feedback link referred to appears to be buried at:
http://www.redhawk.org/index.php/content/view/41/9/
But if you click on it, it also fails!
So, we performed a domain lookup (WHOIS) to find the registrant contact info. for the domain as the only remaining way we know of contacting the site’s owner.
Hopefully, the site issues will be resolved shortly.
Rob
The Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) database has not, to our knowledge, been updated since August of 2006. Although our Email Blacklist Lookup Tool currently still checks the database, we plan to remove this check by the end of 2008 since it is clearly obsolete. The SPEWS database was created to list the IP addresses of ISPs that do not respond to issues with spammers coming from their network.
We received word today that the Intersil blacklist is no longer in use, and have removed it from our lookup tool and email blacklist contact sheet.
If your email server is still using blackholes.intersil.net, you should remove it from your configuration.