What's going on with your SBL listing?

This popped up on my Facebook memories this morning. I don’t post about client events very often, but given I can’t remember even what client this is, I don’t think I’m revealing too much info.
FB memory from a few years ago.

I’m dealing with a client who has a pretty big SBL listing. They’re going through a lot of contortions to fix the problems the SBL is pointing out, but I’m concerned that the SBL listings aren’t the complete story.

I sent them this in an email this morning. I’ve tried to tell them during our calls, but they keep mis-hearing or mis-interpreting what I’m saying. So I write down some speculations and send them by email.

Then a friendly, neighborhood SBL person contacts me and asks me a question about something totally unrelated. So I get about 4 sentences into my question and he says “Imma gonna let you finish, but let me tell you <exactly what I told the client might be going on behind the scenes>.

Yeah. Sometimes I get it right.

Equifax compromise and their insecure response
Google Postmaster bad IP reputation

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Spamhaus under major dDOS

Late last night I, and a number of other folks, received mail from Spamhaus informing us of a major denial of service attack against their servers. The attack is so bad that the website and main mailserver is currently offline.
DNS services, including rsync and the mirrors, are up and running.
Spamhaus is working to bring the mailserver and website back up, and are hoping to have it up later today.
If there are any critical or particularly urgent SBL issues today, contact your ESP delivery team. The folks who were contacted do have an email address for urgent issues. This is not an address for routine queries, however, and most listees are going to have to wait until normal services are restored to have their listing addressed.
If there is something particularly urgent and your ESP or delivery team does not have a contact address, you can contact me an I can see what I can do.
UPDATE: Most of the IPs people have sent me are actually XBL/CBL listings. But right now the CBL webserver is responding slowly due to the DOS.
If you want to look up a listing without using the Spamhaus website you can use the “host” or “dig” command line tools. To do this reverse the digits in the IP address and append zen.spamhaus.org on the end.
So for the IP 10.11.12.13 you would query 13.12.11.10.zen.spamhaus.org

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Dealing with blocklists, deliverability and abuse people

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.
bingo__email__save_1
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.

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Spamhaus dDOS

I got mail late last night from one of the Spamhaus peeps telling me that they were under a distributed Denial of Service (dDOS) attack. This is affecting email. Incoming email is delayed and they’re having difficulty sending outgoing email. This is affecting their responses to delisting queries.
They are working on mitigation and hopefully will be fully up and running soon.
Updates when I get them.
Update (8/29/2012): mail to Spamhaus should be back.

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