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Removing Site from Spam Filters and ISP Blocks?
Blaine Garrett asks: "I run a small online art community called the Art Attack. A lot of my members that sign up are not getting their welcome emails and newsletters. Most often, I cannot even directly email the members. Services such as hotmail automatically put email from my server in the junk mail folder. A while back someone was using the server to bounce spam. I am not sure if this is the direct cause, or not. Is there away to get off the spammer lists of these big services? Additionally, I have been informed that, since the site contains art depicting nudity, ISPs have been blocking the IP of my server. This is rather annoying since I also provide web hosting for other sites on the server. I'm losing customers and hits. Is there a way around this?" With respect to the Spam lists, this article might be helpful, but it may be harder to get the server removed, considering it has already been marked as an open relay. It will be harder to get your server out of ISP Filters, however. One man's "art" can always become another man's "porn", and convincing them otherwise will be difficult to impossible, especially since there is nudity on the site. What suggestions do you have for Mr. Garret, in terms of helping him get his site off of as many lists as possible?
The battle to get your current IP/netblock removed from blacklists will be long, difficult, and in the end, futile.
You need to realize your only choice is to find another ISP/Colo. Avoid choosing known spam friendly colos like rackspace, and get your machine moved. It doesn't take too much effort cruising through NANAE archives and some googling to discover if an ISP is mostly blocked or relatively well respected.
That said, if you do move to a respected section of the internet, then by all means make sure your box is completely locked down. Hire a security consultant if you don't understand all the things you have to check out before putting the box into production in the new place. Since your machine was once a spam host, that tarnish will stay with it until you can prove to the network admins of the world that you are a resposible sysadmin.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Many smaller sites or even users who prefer to send their own mail are finding their port 25 connects bounced, refused or blackholed.
Eventually, only whitelisted big ISP mailservers will accept mail and everyone will be forced to use them if they want their mail to get through. Shades of the Post Office! IMHO, this cure is worse than the disease. Self-inflicted wounds.