Blacklist Patrol
Did you just get blacklisted?
Get notified so you can take action.
Blacklist Patrol
Blacklist Patrol proactively monitors major anti-spam blacklists to see if your email server has been listed on any of them.
You're notified daily by email of any blacklists your server is found on.
What the heck is an Anti-Spam Blacklist?
Anti-spam blacklists are lists of servers, networks or internet domains used by email filtering software to block email which might be spam.
Blacklists are usually maintained by independent organizations such as Spews.org.
Different blacklists have different criteria for inclusion. Some take manual reports of spam from users. Others do automated monitoring of networks and servers to locate common risk factors such as open proxies, or unsecured SMTP (outgoing mail) servers.
Historically blacklists have been deployed server side as a first line of defense against spammers. More recently they have started being used with client-side spam catchers.
On a protocol level, Blacklists usually operate using DNS. For example to check if the ip 10.0.0.1 is a member of a hypothetical blacklist - badservers.org - the DNS query might look something like 1.0.0.10.badservers.org. The request will then return one of several possible IP addresses to indicate if the server was on the list, and possibly additional information regarding the server's status.
Blacklists are far from perfect - and are best used in conjunction with other algorithms and tools to stop spam.
Early versions of SpamButcher had blacklist support enabled by default. Unfortunately one of the blacklists was shutdown in a less than elegant manor - and caused problems for many users. SpamButcher's email blocking software still supports blacklists - but the user has to manually choose to enable them.