Has Your Email Been Blacklisted?
“No one expects the Spammer Inquisition!”
It seems more and more lately that emails I send or emails other people send to me are disappearing. It tends to happen with certain people more than others, and even more puzzling it does not seem to happen all the time. What’s worse is that sometimes there is a notification that the email has been blocked, but most of the time it just vanishes into the ether…
As I’m sure is the case with many writers, I rely on email as my primary form of communication with my clients. So when email disappears without a warning, it is quite unsettling. I did a bit of research and found out that there are many possible reasons, but the most likely causes are all related to email blacklisting.
Email Blacklisting: A Short History
About 10 years ago, self-appointed cyber-vigilantes started creating lists of IPs that were “known” spammers. Companies like SpamCop and The Spamhaus Project put it upon themselves to try to reduce spam by “outing” spammers and putting their IP addresses on a centralized list.
At first, being added to a spam list was essentially meaningless. But then Internet Service Providers (ISPs) started using these lists in their own spam-blocking efforts. Filtering out email from flagged IP addresses was an easy way to reduce spam for their customers. And cheap too, since they didn’t maintain the lists themselves. A lot of emails that are not spam also get caught in this filtering process, but ISPs consider this to be part of the cost of reducing spam.
If you hate spam, you might agree. Any filtering is bound to catch the odd legitimate email. But the truth is that this series of unfolding events have led to a seriously flawed system:
Guilty Until Proven Innocent – There is nobody policing the spam police, and no regulated definitions of what a spammer is. Your IP can be added to any list without warning, reason, or chance for stating your case – it’s up to you to actively look to see if you are mistakenly put on a list. Some companies have many hoops for you to jump through to get your IP address off their lists, and others won’t let you remove your IP at all. So not only are you guilty until proven innocent, in some cases there is not even a way to prove your innocence!
SpamCop even gives the knife an extra twist by making you promise you or anyone else at your IP address will never spam again before removing you from the list – as if you have any control over what other people do. (This is so ridiculous that it reminds me of an old Monty Python skit: “No one expects the Spammer Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and fear… Our two weapons are fear and surprise…” Ironically, it was another Monty Python skit that gave us the term “spam”.)
Guilty By Association – Because most of us have dynamic IPs (randomly assigned IPs common among shared website servers and Internet service providers), a person who had the address before us may have been a spammer. What’s worse, some lists will contain the whole range of your service provider’s IP addresses, so it doesn’t matter what IP you are currently using.
The blacklist companies say that it is up to your ISP to prevent spamming, but the reality is that (A) there is no practical way that they could control everything their users are doing and (B) that still leaves us innocents out in the cold.
Guilty By Association Part II – If your email contains a listed IP address or domain name somewhere in the code, it could be blocked. So if your email message contains a link to a website that is on a blacklist, some filters will block the whole email. More commonly, if your email message is relayed through a flagged IP, filters down the line may trash your email – perhaps even before it reaches your own mailserver.
Improper Use of Filtering Software – If the filtering software that your Internet Service Provider (or one of the relay ISPs) has the wrong settings, it could be blocking even more legitimate email than normal. Even companies like SpamCop explicitly state that being on a blacklist is just one thing to consider before blocking an email. Yet some ISPs use this as its only flag, likely because it is faster and easier than taking the time to set up the filtering software properly.
There are likely other causes, but all that mailserver code is making my head spin. I think you get the idea.
The Cautionary Tale
In a rather famous case, e360insight, an online marketer based in Illinois, successfully sued The Spamhaus Project for $11.7 million. The suit claimed, among other things, defamation, extortion, and blackmail that caused “massive harm to its business”.
The Spamhaus Project never bothered to even show up at the proceedings. First, since it only maintains the list and does not actively block the marketer directly, the company did not feel the need to defend itself. And since the blacklist company is based in the UK, the Illinois ruling is not legally binding anyway. The Spamhaus Project will never have to pay a dime. (Read about the whole story here:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060915-7757.html
So is this a victory for spammers or for the blacklisters? Either way, I think that the rest of us lose. In my mind, I’d rather deal with the spam than know my email may not have reached my client, or vice versa…
There are things you can do in some cases to get yourself off a blacklist. Stay tuned for Part II of this topic: How to Get Yourself Off Email Blacklists.
In the meantime, let me know if you’ve had a run-in with the Spammer Inquisition!
~Graham
Tags: blacklists, computers, email, Monty Python, spam