Scout's Paw Tracks

Sunday, March 05, 2006

SPAM Ego Maniacs and Blacklist Providers

It is time agian for Jim’s useless and annoying websites of the year 2005. I always wait to publish this list until after all the new year hype has subsided. I am not sure why I just do. At Silverblades.net and my other various domain names, I take pride in not allowing pop-ups, not selling e-mail addresses. I also am very diligent about blocking e-mail and web spamming.

This years awards go to those sites who are self indulgent and self proclaimed defenders of the internet without a care about how those practices impact others on the web. Now for a little disclosure, most of these sites I have had a beef with at some point our another have Blacklisted out mail server.

Of 147 sites that create e-mail Blacklist for SPAM e-mail silverblades.net is listed on 11 of them (2 unique sites one of which is a web spammer and has us listed on thier other 10 websites.) the other 136 have us whitelisted since shortly after we set the mail server up years ago. Now that has some impact on people that send me e-mail since I am unable to respond to them. Yes we run our own mail server and only two people use the thing so unless Blade and Scout have figured out how to use e-mail; if they have I am taking that act on the road; I setup the separate mail server so I could,

A.) control when the mail server is and is not available
B.) so I could control the security around it.

If you have sent me a message you will have noticed the challenge response system, it is much more effective than Blacklist though I do use them as well.

So for the list

2. http://www.five-ten-sg.com/ and http://www.five-ten-sg.com/blackhole.php Needs to add a removal address so I can inform them they are blocking a legit mail server. They also should apply the SPAM rules to themselves since they web SPAM thier pages. =P Of the 12 sites that have blacklisted silverblades.net these guys make up 10 of them. Actually our site is not blocked they have blocked all of my Business Providers IP addresses or atleast the range I am in.  They probably have a beef with Charter.  These guys would have been number 1 had it not been for this guy.
1. http://www.blars.org/errors/block.html If you are using this guy as the source of your Blacklist I am glad I can not send you e-mail.  You have to read the page and check out the home page to understand the true web lunacy expressed.

We all have had enough of SPAM and anything that can be done responsibly should be done to shut it down. So there is the list albeit short this year. MX Toolbox is a great site to check your mail servers against and in my humble opinion provide a great service. If you follow the link you will see the result’s for our server.