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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?
I hear you. Getting de-blacklisted is quite possibly one of the most frustrating tasks in existance.
Last week, every site in my netblock got classified by SPEWS, and consequently, SpamCop picked up a message coming from another account on my server and placed us on their 'experimental' blocklist which is apparently used by quite a few ISPs. This prompted a million and a half other spam lists to classify us just because we appeared on spamcop (who handled it much more fairly than the rest - they properly bounce detected spam, and removed us from their list after two days of inactivity.
All because we were A) In the same colo facility as a big-time spammer, and B) on a shared webhost which happened to host a small-time spammer on the same IP.
Long story short, I had to threaten my host that i'd cancel the service unless I got moved to a new IP. After a heated argument, they finally did.
Oh yeah. The two servers which were blocked hosted no more than a boy scout troop and a convent.
Augh.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
after doing those things if you dont get de-listed, I would buy another domain (coupla bucks), if possible get another IP (I dont know how ur server is connected to the i-net), and reconfigure the mail box for the new ip/hostname and update my MX records.... which should be good unless they are blocking ur whole subnet, in which case... i dont have any advice