spamhaus — an unresponsive blacklister

I’ve struggled with email spam heartily, so I know how much of a pain it can be.

And now, through no fault of my own other than choosing a tier-two co-location provider, I’m suffering at the hands of a well known blacklist provider called SpamHaus.

It turns out that a few servers down from me in the datacenter a box was taken over by a spammer. Spamhaus decided to go and blacklist the entire IP range and now I can’t send email to hotmail, optonline, and countless other domains. Technically they don’t do the blocking, they just put you on the list and all the servers that subscribe to that list will block you.  

I emailed them last Thursday, got an automated response that they received my message and SIX DAYS LATER I still have no response.

This is incredibly frustrating and completely out of line. I would have no problem if they had come back to me asking for some sort of proof that I run a legitimate server, I would have provided anything they asked. But to ignore the issue for this long is inexcusable.

For now, I’ve had to set up an SMTP relay at another location and route mail through that, but there are problems with this set up too.

If you are going to run an operation that pretends to be core Internet infrastructure, you must be able to support it.