Another day another dead blacklist

FADE IN
EMAILGEEKS.SLACK.COM #email-deliverability
It is morning in the channel. The regular crowd is around discussing the usual.
JK, smart, competent head of deliverability at an ESP asks: Anyone familiar with SECTOOR EXITNODES listings and have insight into what’s going on if listed?
ME: Uh, that’s the Tor Exit Nodes list. They think your IP is used by Tor. That’s all sorts of weird. Let me do some digging.
5 minutes of google searches, various dig commands and a visit to the now non-existent sectoor.de website show that the sectoor.de domain expired and is now parked.
ME (back in channel): It looks like the blacklist domain expired and is now parked. So they’re listing the world and nothing to worry about. Not your problem, and not anything you can fix.
JK: Like a UCEProtect fiasco – not just us but everyone?
ME: No, more like the spamcannibal fiasco. The domain expired and so it’s listing the world.
ME: The world would be a better place without MXToolbox worrying about every stupid blocklist. Or even if they would follow the blocklist RFC check for expired domains before panicking the world.
SCENE
 

Related Posts

Reading between the lines

Reading between the lines an important skill in deliverability.
Why? Over the last few years there’s been an increasing amount of collaboration between deliverability folks at ESPs and ISPs. This is great. It’s a vast improvement on how things were 10 years ago. However, there are still ongoing complaints from both sides. There probably always will be. And it’s not like a blog post from me is going to fix anything. But I see value in talking a bit about how we can improve our ability to collaborate with one another.

Read More

January 2017: The Month in Email

Between client work and our national political climate, it’s been a very busy month around here and blogging has been light. Things show no sign of slowing down in February, so we’d love to hear from you with questions and suggestions of what you’d most like to see us focus on in our limited blogging time this month. We got a great question about how senders can access their Google Postmaster tools, and I wrote up a guide that you might find useful.

We’re also revisiting some older posts on often-requested topics, such as spamtraps, so feel free to comment below if there are topics you’d like us to address or update. One topic that comes up frequently, both on the blog and in our consulting practice, is about what to do when you’re on a blocklist. I revisited an old-but-still-relevant post on that topic as well.
On the Best Practices front, I wrote about how brands can use multiple channels to connect with customers and prospective customers to promote and enhance email delivery. I also took a moment to look back over 2016 and forward to 2017 in the realm of email security.
I continue to be annoyed by B2B spam, and have started responding to those “requests” for my time directly. Steve also wrote a long post about B2B spam, focusing on how these spammers are using Google and Amazon to try to work around reputation issues.
In case you missed it, I contributed some thoughts to a discussion on 2017 email trends over at Freshmail with my exhortation to “Make 2017 the year you turn deliverability into a KPI.”
I’m also still in the process of completing my 2017 speaking schedule, so I’m looking for any can’t-miss conferences and events you’d recommend. Thanks for keeping in touch!

Read More

Spamhaus comments on subscription attack

Steve Linford, CEO of Spamhaus commented on my blog post about the current listings. I’m promoting it here as there is valuable information in it.

Read More