I started seeing some folks complain about false CBL listings a few hours ago. I’m now seeing the same folks saying the listings are being removed.
The symptoms look similar to what happened in November (mentioned here), but it appears the CBL team are on top of things and are working to rectify things quickly.
There are a lot of things all of us in the deliverability, abuse and blocklist space have heard, over and over and over again. They’re so common they’re running jokes in the industry. These phrases are used by spammers, but a lot of non-spammers seem to use them as well.
The most famous is probably “I’m sure they’ll unblock me if I can just explain my business model.” Trust me, the folks blocking your mail don’t want to hear about your business model. They just want you to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. In fact, I’m one of the few people in the space who actually wants to hear about your business model – so I can help you reach your goals without doing things that get you blocked.
A few months ago, after getting off yet another phone call where I talked clients down from explaining their business model to Spamhaus, I put together list of phrases that senders really shouldn’t use when talking to their ESP, a blocklist provider or an abuse desk. I posted it to a closed list and one of the participants put it together into a bingo card.
A lot of these statements are valid marketing and business statements. But the folks responsible for blocking mail don’t really care. They just want their users to be happy with the mail they receive.
Update: As of Nov 24, 2015 11:18 Pacific, Spamhaus has rebuilt the zone and removed the broken entries. Expect the new data to propagate in 10 – 15 minutes. Delivery should be back to normal.
The CBL issued a statement, which I reposted for readers that find this post in the future. I think it’s important to remember there is a lot of malicious traffic out there and that malicious traffic affects all of us, even if we never see it.
Original Post from 10am pacific on Nov 24
Mid-morning west coast time, I started seeing an uptick in reports from many ESPs and marketers that they were getting listed on the XBL/CBL. Listings mentioned the kelihos spambot.
The CBL website is back on line.
It’s possible that your local DNS resolver has old values for it cached. If so, and if you can’t flush your local DNS cache, and you really can’t wait until DNS has been updated then you may be able to put a temporary entry in your hosts file to point to cbl.abuseat.org.
You can get the IP address you need to add by querying the nameserver at ns-2038.awsdns-62.co.uk for cbl.abuseat.org. No, I’m not going to tell you the IP address – if you can’t do a basic DNS query, you shouldn’t be modifying your hosts file and you can just wait a day.