Showing posts with the label spamhaus

Does Spamhaus matter today?

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: Still yes, and here's why. Spamhaus. If you're in the business of sending email, you've probably heard the name. Maybe not as much lately. But that doesn't mean you can ignore them. Right now, email senders are heads-down trying to get their SPF, DKIM, and DMARC right. Between new MAGY sender requirements, complaint rate thresholds, and prop…
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Talking Spamhaus with Andrew Barrett

Last week for my Valimail "Ask Al" video series, I interviewed Andrew Barrett as Spamhaus. Following up on a prior video where the topic was blocklists (with Alison Gootee) , I thought it would be good to connect with the biggest blocklist out there and share a tiny …

Spamhaus Listing Myths: Fact or Fiction?

Back in the day, people used to complain that Spamhaus never really interacted with the broader email community. And to some degree they were right -- Spamhaus people sometimes avoided the public spotlight, for various reasons, many of them legit (they get threatened by bad guy…

Spamhaus: A new website, with new data

International anti-spam and security experts Spamhaus have been teasing the launch of their new website for a while now. And now that it's finally here , you'll want to check it out . Besides the usual domain and IP blocklist lookup tools, there's also more overall…

Spamhaus blocking queries from Digital Ocean Cloud servers

As part of their continuing efforts to lock down unrestricted public access to their reputation data, Spamhaus has announced that as of February 14, 2024, they'll be blocking DNSBL queries made via Digital Ocean's Cloud Server infrastructure. Read more about it here . T…

Spamhaus wants your spam!

Now's your chance! Whether or not you've got your own spamtrap and data feed, or if you're just being doggedly annoyed non-stop by a particular jerky spammer, you can now pass information directly to Spamhaus, with the hope that it will help inform their spam filter…

Spamhaus: False positive issue on Friday 10/13

A number of folks have reached out to me (and posted on various forums) asking about a Spamhaus glitch last Friday night (October 13th), US time. I reached out to Matthew Stith at Spamhaus and he was able to confirm for me that there was indeed a temporary issue then that led t…

Spamhaus: The return of the ASN-DROP

Spamhaus just announced that they've "reinvigorated" the ASN-DROP list , now available in JSON format. The point of this whole thing is for network operators (think ISPs and similar) to just totally block off any potential connections with really bad networks that…

Spamhaus glitch Friday night

Blocklist provider and master spam-filterer Spamhaus had a glitch overnight (Friday to Saturday, August 18-19) starting at about 8:20 pm US central time. The glitch resulted in a bunch of false positive Spamhaus blocklistings. They were accidental and the listings have since b…

ICYMI: Webinar Recap: Spamhaus, Domain Reputation & More

My recent Kickbox webinar, co-hosted with Matthew Stith from Spamhaus, was a lot of fun. We talked about the history of Spamhaus, what kind of bad guy stuff Spamhaus is trying to track, best practices for domain reputation and we touched on a bunch of other stuff, too. If you m…

Spamhaus Deliverability 101 eBook

Did you know? Spamhaus has a free eBook to help email marketers know how to do the right thing. With an introduction by Annalivia Ford, one-time postmaster for AOL (remember them?), this deliverability guide from Spamhaus will walk senders through the concepts of deliverabili…

Webinar Alert: Me + Matthew Stith from Spamhaus

Hey, fellow email nerds! It's webinar time again. What do you know about Spamhaus ? If not everything, I hope you'll join Matthew Stith and myself on March 21st at 9:00 am central time, where we'll talk about Spamhaus, what it is, how (and why) blocklists work, how …

Spamhaus suffered outage; is back now

From 17:00 GMT on Feb 16th through 09:50 GMT on February 17th, spam filterer/security service Spamhaus suffered an outage that meant that "data included in the Data Query Service, Rsync, Spamhaus Intelligence API, and Border Gateway Protocol Firewall was not refreshed bet…

Does Gmail use Spamhaus? Or any other blocklists?

This is a question I get a lot. Does Gmail use any blocklists? Or, somebody will tell me that they're having Gmail issues, and they've plugged their own IP address into an online blocklist lookup tool , and they are sure that any results found (blocklisting issues) must…

Pro-tip: Age that new domain before sending

Here’s an easy tip that I wanted to share with everyone. It’s something I knew about myself but didn’t take into consideration (I guess I got tripped up in my own "do as I say, not as I do" kind of thing). As mentioned, recently I set up my own mailbox provider to ho…

Spamhaus is not blocking Gmail

A friend warned me of a scenario that could have the potential to freak people out, if misunderstood. It looks like this: This person is using Spamhaus to filter inbound mail. They seem to be rejecting mail from Gmail due to a Spamhaus listing. The Spamhaus website DOES suggest…

Spamhaus to block queries from AWS

Hey, email nerds! Are you like me, running various random EC2 instances with scripts or applications that do a bunch of spam and email message analysis, checking (among other things) all the domains and IPs you find? Okay, there aren't millions of us, but I know I'm not…

Spamhaus just woke up. Are you ready?

Timely! I just blogged recently talking about what you should do if you get blocklisted by Spamhaus , and now Spamhaus just posted this:  Poor sending practices trigger a tidal wave of informational listings . What does it all mean and should you be concerned? Let me explain. W…

Blocklisted by Spamhaus? Here's what to do.

After finding some shockingly bad advice out there on other websites (no, I'm not the type to name and shame), I thought that it might be a good idea to write up my own thoughts on what senders should do if blocklisted by Spamhaus , published over on the Kickbox blog. I cou…

Get the basics right, and inbox placement will follow – Change.org's deliverability story

Yesterday, I explained who Spamhaus is , and today I share a link to a guest blog post over at Spamhaus , authored by Alice Cornell, Director of Email Deliverability at Change.org, explaining her deliverability journey and how she helps guide Change.org to maximize inbox placem…