Hello all,
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!
). 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…
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
