Recent flood of delisting requests

Something must have changed over at MX Toolbox as they have started reporting it to people who are using their services that we list the IPs that are being monitored. The listings in question are of any age, from over two years old to very recent.

To all concerned with these:

<rant>

  • Don’t waste your own time if you haven’t had a mail non-delivery report caused by our listings. If you have problems with Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or any other large receiver system, we can’t solve that for you. They aren’t using our data anyway.
  • If you have (had) a problem related to malware or compromised user accounts, it’s great that you fixed it but we’re not interested. We don’t try to do the job of Spamhaus, the CBL, the SURBL or the likes. We didn’t list anything because of a security problem anyway. We only list based on deliberate spam sent by real live Scientific Spammers. See the mission statement of the Scientific Spam DNSBL to learn more.
  • Look up the TXT record of the listing involved. See the IS SOMETHING LISTED? page for instructions on how to do that.
  • If the listing is an escalation against your provider, as it probably is, save your breath. Writing to us accomplishes nothing. If you have written to your provider and they tell you to take care of it yourself, they’re lying to you. For escalation listings, the only kind of request that will ever accomplish anything at all is the kind that comes from the provider responsible for the network.
  • Save your breath with the threats too. They will get you absolutely nowhere at all.

</rant>

5 thoughts on “Recent flood of delisting requests

  1. AJ

    Thank you for this information.

    I can confirm looking at the TXT record, that our IP is listed so I don’t think we can blame MX Toolbox at this point because the IP is listed on your database. So is there a way to find out how an IP actually got listed ? The IP that is in question is not used to send out any emails since the server uses a 3rd party mail relay service and uses SMTP to authentication for outgoing emails. In this case, am I wrong to assume someone else in the same subnet is the actual spammer?

    Reply
    1. RocketScientist Post author

      MX Toolbox is certainly reporting existing listings. We don’t have an issue with that. It appears that they have only recently started reporting on our listings at all, and as a result, folks are suddenly reacting to something that’s been there for months, even years, even though it’s not resulting in actual blocked mail in the overwhelming majority of cases because our reach is far from universal.

      With regard to “what happened!?”, see https://scientificspam.net/?page_id=158 for instructions. This posting was created for the specific case that somebody else but the requestor is the cause of the listing as per your assumption.

      Reply
  2. RocketScientist Post author

    Corollary: Don’t send multiple requests about the same listing. It will not result in a different outcome. Don’t have multiple people send in the same request, and don’t send website comments. All delisting requests should be by email, and if we’ve already responded to you, and you keep sending in new requests that indicate you haven’t read the previous response or don’t care, then we will just start deleting your new requests.

    Reply
    1. RocketScientist Post author

      Basically indefinitely – until somebody develops an interest in having a listing removed.

      At that time, we need to hear from whoever is in a position to speak authoritatively about the continued existence, if any, of the problem. If you write in about your ISP being listed, we’ll just tell you to contact your ISP and ask them to contact us directly.

      Reply

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