Blacklisted! A cautionary tale
 

Hello all,|waves|

I ran into a problem a couple of weeks ago and felt I should share it with you my fellow newbies as a cautionary tale: my domain is blacklisted.|shocking|

What do you care? Well this happened to me but it might happen to you as well: how do I know? Well, you should read on if you wanna know why.

First, let me fill you in with some background.

I own a pay site which I’ve recently inaugurated and had been trying to post some free sites on different LLs and TGPs to promote it, of course, as a total newbie to the world of internet porn I wasn’t getting anywhere. I perceived I was doing something wrong so I came across this forum and decided to join it. This was the right move cause I posted a thread to get some help with my free sites and I received (and am still receiving) some great advice from forum members MrYum and Simon (thanks guys you’ve been invaluable… all around great people!|thumb ). In fact, it was MrYum who let me know that my domain was blacklisted.

As you can imagine I was dumbfounded. How in the hell was my domain blacklisted? Why? When? Where? WHAAAT???|confused|

I had to dig in to try and understand, and do my best to try and correct this big problem.

MrYum told me that DomainTools.com was showing that my domain is currently blacklisted. So I checked DomainTools and, after registering for $15 in order to be able to post an inquiry, I was told to refer to the entity that had caused my blacklisting. This entity turned out to be an Aussie outfit called Spam and Open Relay Blocking System (SORBS). I suggest you check out their site cause it is an experience in and of itself. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to navigate through it, and it was impossible to find answers without registering with them - no monetary cost, but giving my personal info is not something I do light-heartedly, especially when I feel I’m being bullied to do it! So I got my user and pass and it took me 2 days to figure out what I could do in order to get some answers as to why this blacklisting was happening to my domain.

By the way, at this point I was also having problems in sending out e-mails with attachments bigger than 1MB, and as it turned out, this was happening because SORBS not only had blacklisted my domain: they had also blocked my IP.

Finally I was able to post a query at SORBS and got an answer that could not have been more cryptic (I’m not going to post it at this point cause it’s kinda longwinded, but if any of you are interested I’ll do it later).

Basically I had to go through a good amount of extremely technical lingo (of which I am not an expert at all) and was able to draw some conclusions and understand why this was happening.

The reason for my blacklisting is that I access the net through an ISP that has assigned to my PC a Dynamic IP address. Big deal right! As far as I know everyone who has a PC and accesses the net through an ISP does so with a dynamic IP address assigned by their ISP. But because I also manage my site through that Dynamic IP I have become guilty by suspicion: I am guilty of being a potential spammer!

Basically, dynamic IP addresses are preferred by spammers because they make it difficult to find out who is actually doing it. Because I have a dynamic IP, and own a domain, this makes me a potential spammer for the good people at SORBS.

At this point, I should point out that: I Hate spam! And, more importantly, spamming would be illegal on my part because my contracts with hosting and with CCBill specifically prohibit it (I did point this out to SORBS but was completely ignored).

Wanna know what I’m guilty of?
I’m guilty of sending out e-mails with attachments to my friends. I’m guilty of having several friends with whom I exchange messages with attachments… In essence: I’m guilty of sending out the same e-mail message to several people whom I know!

A possible remedy to satisfy SORBS would be that I get a static IP and go on with my business, but that is impossible here in old Italy because static IPs are only affordable by big corporations or big time industry.

So here I am, poor little SOB trying to earn a living and being blacklisted just for existing!

I’ll be changing ISP soon and hope this will take care of the problem, but because I’ll be getting a dynamic IP address from the new ISP as well, I’m afraid my domain will not get rid of the blacklisting.

At this point I’ve gotten a new domain name and will use it just for my submissions to LLs and TGPs; I hope this will give me a shot at getting listed somewhere, but only time will tell. One thing is for sure: if I can’t submit free sites to promote my pay site I’m dead in the water, and a year of hard work to get my project going has been all but wasted…|banghead|

Well, that’s it folks, this is what’s going on. Hope this helps you with averting potential problems in the future. If you manage your site from home and can’t afford to get a static IP from your ISP, you’ve got to figure out a way to manage your site without using the same IP you use for your personal messages, because I’m pretty sure you too have friends, and you too exchange e-mails with them and, sometimes, you might feel the insane urge to share a funny clip or a cool song with more then one of them at the same time!!! Look out then, because the good people at SORBS might be watching over you! Big brother is alive and well and is sending his regards my dears!!!

My apologies for being verbose, but brevity is not one of my foremost qualities.

Be well one and all!

Peace!

Zio|headbang|

Id go and get some paid hosting for your paysite and free site submitting domain. That would solve any future problems right? Quite a few people here use colo-cation and I use phatservers. I have zero chance this could happen to me since I dont have a domain on the same ip Im on but damn... thats some bad luck. Hope you get everything straightened out. Its hard enough breaking into this business without things like that happening. Good luck to you. Sounds like you have a good head on your shoulders and you will do well despite your shaky start.

Cheers
WB

Wow...that's some tale!

I did read it, but am not sure...is WarBot right? Is your domain hosted on the same IP you use for net access?

I'm on cable here...and my ip is indeed static. Unless, I actually shut down all equipment and force a new connection. At that point, sometimes my ip will be re-assigned.

But, from what you describe...their logic makes no sense |crazy|

Think I'm going to hold off on any other comments until I know if WarBot is correct in his reading...

And Zio...thanks very much for posting this |thumb

Given the number of domains I'm seeing recently on that list, it'll be good to have a solid understanding of WHY this is happening.

I was just thinking about it and I believe thats like the #1 scammer indicator. I havent had my tgp up for long but Ive already noted that alot of the cheaters have the same ip for their domain as they do for the ip they submitted from. Another big indicator is the ones that give descriptions like "Unambiguous aviator attentively struck breasts among interference". I would think it would be easier just to write an actual description then to come up with that crap for every gallery lol. Funny shit. Anyways, If I was correct about what you were saying I would definately get my domains hosted on a different ip.

Cheers
WB!

Zio

Altough I didn't fully understand how the changing IP story made you a spammer in SORBS eyes, Italy is known for the big quantity of spam originating from computers located here, and for the lack of action about this from the tech guys of Telecom Italia.

At work we had a similar problem with some blacklist, and when we phoned them to ask what is happening, we found out that they had banned several C ip classes, because they were receiving spam reports for about two years now and still no response from Telecom Italia.

If you have a flat *DSL connection, buy an *DSL router and leave it always connected. This way you'll have the same IP for ever (except, off course, if the power goes down or something).

I saw that a lot more of italians are having the same problem, here on Wikipedia.

If you need support in dealing with SORBS, we may help you if you post here their response.

Hope to help.

[later edit]
After checking the SORBS database, I found that my IP was in their list, too (they blacklisted the ips from 87.16.0.0 to 87.23.255.255, this means more than 320.000 IPs).
And guess what, the IPs are belonging to Telecom Italia |angry|
[/later edit]

I think you are way off base. He has paid hosting and hasn't indicated that he's using software which submits from his server's IP.

Zio - contact your host and inform them that the IP you are on is blacklisted by SORBS and see if they can handle the issue for you. Also, if I use the this link, with your domain in it, http://whois.domaintools.com/toxsite.com it shows that your server's IP is blacklisted. But if I got to http://whois.domaintools.com and then enter your domain, it says Blacklist Status: Clear - weird, eh? Unless you are sending an inordinate amount of emails, I'm not convinced that it has anything to do with you or your activities. That IP may have been banned before you even started hosting on that server. (It happened to me with Spamhaus and the host got it fixed for me.)

Also, I don't see how being on that blacklist would affect whether or not link lists accept your sites. Your server's IP being blacklisted for SPAM has nothing to do with your free sites.

Hi everybody
 

Thanks for reading...

Useless Warrior is right on the money!|thumb

I do have paid hosting and I work from home. My server's IP is not the one I have at home, yet both IPs are blacklisted... But Useless Warrior also brings up something that left me kinda pissed... I tried the domaintools.com thing and got the results you mentioned... I'm even more confused |loony| but I'll contact my hosting to be sure. Thanks a lot man!|thumb |thumb

Looking forward to MrYum's take on the issue.

Hey Kitty_Kate! Glad to hear from someone stranded on the same boot I'm in. |waves| There is no other way about it: Telecom Italia Sucks!!! I'll be changing ISP in a few days and hope the problem will go away with them. No need to post the SORBS message unless you need it, in that case just let me know and I'll put it up. Thanks for the offer.

Thanks for joining the discussion WarBot!

Health to all,

Zio|headbang|

Thanks UW...that does shed some light on the issue |thumb

A banned IP from the host explains a lot of things.

Maybe I'm the only one not listing sites on the spam blacklist...which was why I wanted to get some clarity as to what's going on. Originally, when I started seeing this...my thought was if they're on the spam blacklist...I want nothing to do with them. Also, there's the whole bad neighborhood thing with google...don't want to take any chances.

Zio, really sorry to put you through the wringer man. I'd suspect UW is right on the mark and simply getting your host to change the IP will fix you up :)

I never said he was using software to submit anything? But oops anyways. I guess I misunderstood his original post and thought his surfing ip was the same as his domains ip. Which could happen if you host your own domains or if your isp hosts them I suppose. Anyways, glad everything is clear now|thumb good luck with it zio.