What’s for breakfast? Egg bacon spam and sausage! We have come a long way since Monty Python’s spam skit, but one thing remains true: no one likes spam. Email blacklisting is a necessary evil in today’s email service world. Major email blacklist companies, such as Spamhaus and Spamcop, have a simple goal: block out the spam… all the spam.
How Blacklists Work
Blacklists are a strong mechanism against spam because they compile into lists all the current known sources of spam. These IP based lists receive constant spam reports from around the globe. As soon as a server has a large volume of emails going out, it is flagged but not necessarily blocked. A large amount of continuous outgoing spam reports will eventually lead to blocking.
A hosting service provider like ourselves use these lists by setting them up on our servers. Consequently, anytime an email is received from one of these sources, it can be filtered out by our own settings, or automatically rejected. Fortunately, these lists have an almost immediate update feature, therefore a server that becomes listed or delisted is communicated almost instantly.
Blacklisted Shared Hosting Servers
Our business here at Funio is shared hosting servers. Unfortunately, on occasion, one of our servers becomes blacklisted, regardless of all the precautions we have put into place (CSF/LFD, CageFS, mod_security, etc.). Either due to a customer’s loose coding or his/her use of an outdated CMS like WordPress or Joomla, an account can become compromised, malicious code injected into the site that then starts using the mail server for spam. This can also happen when customers use weak passwords or have the classic email test@mydomain.com with test1234 as a password. If you have such an account, please go and delete it now.
Getting Out Of a Blacklist
It is the server owner that is responsible for getting himself removed from the blacklist. For example, earlier this June, Hotmail had a large number of servers blacklisted by Spamcop. Although we received many requests from our customers to amend this situation, there was nothing we could do because the servers blacklisted do not belong to us.
The process for being delisted ranges from easy to almost impossible, depending on the IP address reputation and history. Sometimes it can be as quick as filling out a form on the reporting blacklist website, and at other times it can take several days to several weeks of back and forth communications for an agreement to be settled.
In any case, it is very important to leave the delisting procedures up to the server administrator. Why? Because if the spam problem has not been resolved and someone made a delisting request, the blacklist will catch the server IP again, and it will take longer to remove the blacklisting once the issue is truly fixed.
