[SURBL-Discuss] More than 14 days - still blocked.

Catherine Jefferson ariel at spambouncer.org
Sun Feb 22 17:45:24 CET 2015


On 2/21/2015 11:48 PM, Ryan Rigby wrote:
> Thanks so much for your response, Catherine. You were looking up the
> right domain. And this is part of our frustration, we are clear by
> every check I have run, and we always have been, it was just this one
> SURBL list for one day, for an unknown reason and our business is
> still suffering. We did recently move a number of services to a new
> public subnet, this was a week ago, one week after the blacklist
> addition.

OK, that accounts for the inconsistent DNS indications I saw.  That had
nothing to do with spam, by the way, but I have known of companies that
ran into problems when the changed DNS and moved to previously
blacklisted IPs.

By the way, when I said that you were not on any blacklists, that
includes SURBL.  I always check them; they're both important (widely
used) and usually allergic to false positives.  You might consider the
possibility that the problem lies, not with SURBL, but with LinkedIn,
which has a reputation for being a lot less reasonable.

> Would you have any idea what 'multiple reports of unsolicited
> messages' could mean? Does this mean someone has gone to the effort
> to complain about a mail they received from us or would it be spam
> software doing the reporting?

It could be either one.  If you have any email marketing efforts ongoing
(and what company does not?), I'd check to ensure that they aren't
emailing lists that they didn't build manually, and that the email
addresses are all valid and engaged.  But I certainly did not see any
indications of trouble either on my own platform or on any of several
others that I have access to.

> Despite pressing SURBL, they have given no way of knowing how we came
> to be on the list.

Blacklists often don't.  Those of us who do anti-spam have learned to
our cost that revealing information can lead to identification of
spamtraps, and to lawsuits by companies who have unclean hands but also
more money for lawyers than we do. :/  Unfortunately it also hinders our
efforts to improve things, because of course ISPs and companies need to
know where the problems lie to fix them.

As I said earlier, your domain is not currently listed on any of the
SURBL lists that I checked.  My suspicion is that you are running up
against problems at LinkedIn, not with SURBL.

I wish I could suggest what to do next, but I'm stumped.


-- 
Catherine Jefferson <ariel at spambouncer.org>
MainSleaze Blog: http://mainsleaze.spambouncer.org



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