Terminology

There is a lot more to say here, and I’m working on a longer post to really talk about the underlying racism in tech and how we as an industry have failed.

In the deliverability space, specifically, the use of blacklist/whitelist is terminology rooted in racism (black is bad, white is good). Many DNSBLs use the block terminology and have done for a while. But there are still too many places that talk about blacklists and whitelists (including here even though we make an effort to not use those terms).

Better terminology is blocklist and safelist. I recommit to using blocklist as the right terminology and commit to using safelist moving forward.

It’s not enough. It’s not the only thing I am doing to support equality and fight racism. But I’m making the commitment here, publicly.

Related Posts

Asking for help with a blocklist

There are often questions arising about how to go about getting off a particular blocklist. A few years ago I led the MAAWG effort to document what to if if you were On a Blocklist (pdf link). That document was aimed primarily at MAAWG members and deliverability experts with working knowledge of blocklists. I think, even now, it’s a good background on how to deal with a listing and mail being blocked.
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There have been discussions on multiple mailing lists over the last week or so about how to deal with listings at different blocklists. Many folks on these lists have extensive experience, so these are good places to ask. With that being said, a lot of the requests lack sufficient details to help.
So, if you’re ever on a blocklist and want some help from a mailing list about the problem, here’s a short guide for how to ask for help.

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Fake DNSBLs

Spamhaus recently announced a few years ago that they have discovered a company that is pirating various blocklists, relabeling them and selling access to them. Not only is the company distributing the zones, they’re also running a “pay to delist” scheme whereby senders are told if they pay money, they’ll be removed from the lists.
The fake company does remove the listing from the fake zones, but does nothing to remove the IP from the original sender. This company has been caught in the past and was blocked from downloading Spamhaus hosted zones in the past, but have apparently worked around the blocks and are continuing to pirate the zone data.
It’s not clear how many customers the blocklist has, although one ESP rep told me they were seeing bounces referencing nszones.com at some typo domains.
No legitimate DNSBL charges for delisting. While I, and other people, do consult for senders listed on the major blocklists, this is not a pay for removal. What I do is act as a mediator and translator, helping senders understand what they need to do to get delisted and communicating that back to the blocklist. I work with senders to identify good, clean addresses, bad address segments and then suggest appropriate ways to comply with the blocklist requirements.

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Rethinking public blocklists

Recently, a significant majority of discussions of email delivery problems mention that neither the IPs or domains in use are on any of the public blocklists. I was thinking about this recently and realised that, sometime in the past, I stopped using blocklists as a source of useful information about reputation.

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