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SURBL Announce new experimental URL based blocklist

On Thursday, the team behind the SURBL domain blacklists announced a new, experimental blacklist: xs.surbl.org.

As announced on the SURBL-Announce list: “An experimental source of some snowshoe and pill domains is now being published in xs.surbl.org.  SURBL considers this feed to be experimental and would very much welcome feedback about it, particularly about any false positives.  Does anyone know anyone who actually wants to receive snowshoe messages?”

You can read the entire announcement here.

So what’s different about this blacklist/blocklist?

Most blacklists or blocklists are IP based, e.g they contain a list of computers and servers which have sent spam in the past. However because of the increased use of botnets (compromised computers) to send spam SURBL have for a while now maintained a list of websites advertised within spam messages. This allows mail administrators to add another useful tool to their content filtering e.g check for known websites known to be associated with spam.

SURBL claim that using these types of lists combined with traditional blocklists upto 95% of spam can be blocked.

This particular blocklist from SURBL focuses on pill and snowshoe websites.

Email Manual has a new look

Email Manual has had a holiday season makeover. If you haven’t been to the site in a little while come and check it out.

The new look site has better integration with our twitter feed, the ability to increase and decrease the size of the text within posts and an improved share to social networks function.

We hope you enjoy the new look and appreciate any feedback.

AOL’s new IP based reputation monitor

AOL has today launched a new postmaster site. The new site along with its design revamp contains information on best practice guidelines, its whitelisting policy including the three different types of whitelist available, one of which allows guaranteed delivery (goodmail certified mail) and how to join their feedback loop.

For more information on why you should join their feedback loop click here for our previous article on the subject.

In addition to the normal postmaster information listed above AOL has created an IP reputation check tool.

The tool allows anyone to check on their IP reputation as it is measured by AOL. This is a great feature for bulk mailers.

This reputation check allows mailers to see if their RDNS (reverse DNS) has propagated to the AOL servers, one of the basic requirements to send mail to AOL is to have a valid and resolvable rDNS entry, and a 3 color traffic light indicating the status of the IP:

  • Green is good
  • Yellow is neutral
  • Red is poor
  • Grey is unknown (AOL have no data)

AOL say that “Mailers should take time to familiarize themselves with this new site, the valuable information contained therein and update their existing bounce codes/classifications with the published ones. AOL’s quote on their new website.” Sound advice.

You can familarize yourself with the new AOL postermaster site here.

Industry Alert: Cox.net launches new postmaster page.

COX.net have launched a new postmaster site.

Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, but we particually like this one. It’s comprehensive and one of the few that is actually useful to system administrators trouble shooting blocked messages without looking dated on the day it launches like some other major ISP’s postmaster sites.

The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox’s feedback loop which operates like many others through returnpath. The pages probably won’t give enough information to solve all delivery issues, but they are helpful in getting started and troubleshooting the issues yourself.

Remember, always use the ISP’s postmaster site before sending an email to the ISP’s abuse team, your likely to get a lot better response if you have checked the FAQ’s yourself.

Let us know what you think, post a comment below.

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New feedback loop (FBL) from Tucows by returnpath.

Today return path and tucows wholesale division OpenSRS have announced a new feedback loop.

For more information on feedback loops see ‘What are feedback loops (fbl’s) and how can they help my deliverability?

Tucows is the third-largest wholesale domain registrar, providing Internet services, through its wholesale division known as OpenSRS, for more than 8 million domains. Tucows hosts millions of email inboxes on its OpenSRS Email Service. This feedback loop will cover all of those inboxes.

For a while now OpenSRS and Returnpath have been offering the feedback loop to limited returnpath customers as a private beta process. Now that the kinks and issues have been ironed out this has been made publically available free of charge to parties sending large amounts of mail to OpenSRS members. The feedback loop (FBL) will forward any mail reported as spam originating from the associated IP addresses back to the listed email address given within the application.

The new feedback loop application is available on the following website. http://fbl.hostedemail.com/

For a full list of feedback loops and information on how to sign up, click here.

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