Picking A Host

Make sure you check their not blacklisted for spamming

[EliteWeb]

I didn't spam anyone. Infact I've been with this host for almost a year and something bad had happened. I didn't have open relays or anything like that.

A known spammer had a box co-located at my providers network. Within 48 hours of their colocation the whole ISP was blacklisted by spam filters around the world that follow spammers. The guy didnt spam anyone yet, but the groups who do the monitoring and spam filters for the blacklists (relay) cought wind of his move.

So when checking for a host, its wise to check the hosting companies IP address with the spam relay blacklists. Now most every message I send out gets bounced back saying that the block of IPs is blacklisted.

The hosting co. took the guy off the network and is trying to resolve this. But this has made business truly hard for communication when all you do is e-mail the people.

[pageoneresults]

Hey there EW, this whole spam issue is really getting out of hand. Unfortunately it's that old adage that "one bad apple ruins the whole bunch".

I just had a similar issue with a client blocking incoming email spam. They ended up including their info@ email addresses in the spam filter and were wondering why they were not getting any contact requests from their sites!

[webmasterworld.com...]

[EliteWeb]

Resources to check if your hosting co, or IP addresses have records at can be found here:

Computers > Internet > Abuse > Spam > Blacklists [directory.google.com]

Most of the people just have you put in the IP address to see if its been tagged. Open Relay Database (ORDB) and OsiruSoft Open Relay Spam seems to be the lists that have effected us.

[rogerd]

Wow - blacklisted before the first "bleeding gums" e-mail was even sent! That's scary, particularly for the sites that did nothing wrong.

I saw a stat recently that 11% or so of e-mail gets lost, mostly due to crude spam filtering. If you are a company doing online billing or similar mission-critical activities, that has to be a huge headache.

I've checked out web hosts in USENET abuse discussions, but is there any central place to check to see if your potential new host could be blacklisted?

[rogerd]

Thanks, Elite, I was completing my post when you did yours... nice anticipation of my question!