Email Blacklist Monitoring

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:

Visit redhawk.org

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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.

Just wanted to let everyone know that our lookup tool now includes the BRBL from Barracuda. For email administrators who wish to use the BRBL directly (e.g. from within Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, sendmail, Postfix, and qmail, etc.) please note that you need to register your email server IP addresses directly with Barracuda Networks.

For users of our Email Blacklist Lookup Tool, we’ve taken care of the registration process for you. You just need to enter your Email server’s IP address in our tool to see if it is in the BRBL database.

Please let us know if you have any related problems or questions.

-Rob

On October 2, 2008, Barracuda Networks announced the availability of their Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL) for free, general use by email admins. Their reasoning for introducing a new blacklist appears to revolve around their core spam filtering products, which allows them to automatically create and update the blacklist. This email blacklist is another database-oriented approach, where IP addresses that are perceived to have gone “bad” (e.g. originated spam) are automatically added to the database. Read the full BRBL press release here.

We will add the BRBL to our Email Blacklist lookup tool as soon as possible.

Due to the frequency and similarity of the requests we get on a variety of topics that affect email marketers (and especially email blacklists!), we’ve implemented The Email Blacklist Blog. Let us know about any topics that you’d like us to discuss or research for you, and help us to help you!

Thanks!

Rob
Email Blacklist Monitoring