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.

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Al has more details over at dnsbl.com.
If you run a blacklist, please don’t shut it down this way. Read up on the suggested practice in RFC 6471. If you just can’t cope with that consider asking people you know in the industry for help gracefully shutting it down.
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For IPv6 blacklists the always listed address is “::FFFF:7F00:2” and the never listed address is “::FFFF:7F00:1”. For domain-based blacklists the always listed hostname is “TEST” and the never listed hostname is “INVALID”. See RFC 5782 for more details. (And, obviously, check that the blacklists your software supports out of the box actually do implement this before turning it on).
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