Email Blacklist Monitoring

Blacklists Removed

Admin — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:16:02 +0000

The following blacklists have been determined to be no longer properly reporting, and have been removed from our lookup tool:

BGISOCBL, DEADBEEF, GIRL, NLKUNBLACKLIST, ORID, RANGERSBL, SDERB, SNARK, US, SOLID, SPAMRBL, TECHNOVISION

If you are a bulk email sender, you should not have concerns related to these blacklists any longer. If you are an IT organization, we strongly recommend using the email blacklists highlighted in our organization list, and removing these if you have been using any of them.

Blacklist Changes

Admin — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:01:55 +0000

Added pbl.spamhaus.org (another spamhaus blacklist).
TRIUMF changed their server to rbl2 – we’ve updated our database accordingly.

More Email Blacklists Defunct

Admin — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 20:30:30 +0000

The following email blacklists have been confirmed obsolete, and have been removed from our IP lookup tool: CSMA (bl.csma.biz) NJABL (dnsbl.njabl.org) – not just another bogus list FIVETENFREE (blackholes.five-ten-sg.com) SPAMSOURCES (spamsources.dnsbl.info) WYTNIJ (spam.whtnij.to) Please be sure that your email server … Continue reading →

SATOS Blacklist Obsolete

Admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 04:04:35 +0000

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.

Email Marketing + Social Media

Admin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:40:36 +0000

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.

BDHFQG6NN5KD

Webspam

Admin — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:52:16 +0000

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.

FIVETENFREE

Admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:34:16 +0000

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

Email blacklist rbl.cluecentral.net removed…

Admin — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:47:52 +0000

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!

Browser Blacklists

Admin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:25:57 +0000

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.

2013 Update: We plan to post a tool to check for browser blacklisting in the near future.

JAMM DNSBL Discontinued

Admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:53:22 +0000

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.