Subscribe Feed (RSS)Are You Blacklisted? How to check the SPAM Blacklists
September 14th, 2007 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Technology, Tutorials.Taking Care of a SPAMMER . . .
I was notified earlier today that someone had been SPAMMING members of one of my forums. Of course, I was upset, but instead of getting annoyed, I took action to ensure this person was stopped. I looked up WhoIs record using my favorite site for the occasion, http://whois.sc. From there I was able to determine who his host was, and contacted their abuse system (Hosts do not like SPAMMERS! It is illegal to SPAM and if they find out that you are using their server to SPAM, they will boot you immediately).
I’ve been notified that they are handling the situation . . .
Sometimes, the people you’re fighting host their own servers, and reporting them is not so easy. In that case, you’ll likely need to report them directly to the various Blacklists. Follow the directions below to find out how to contact the various blacklist providers.
How Can You Check to See if You or Another Website Have Been Blacklisted?
There is an easy way to check the blacklists!
- Go to MX Toolbox
- Enter the domain of the site you are interested in, in the lookup box and select the button [MX Lookup]
- You’ll now see results including: Preference, Host Name, IP Address, TTL, and you’ll see two buttons (Diagnostics & Blacklists)
- Click on the Blacklists button and you’ll see a screen with the site’s IP address in a box.
- Click the [Blacklist Check] button
What you’ll see is the IP address checked against 122 known blacklists. If the status is OK, then there are no problems. If it is not OK, there should be an explanation.
There will be links to all of the Blacklists, and if for some reason your site has mistakenly been added, there are usually explanations on their sites of how to remove yourself.
Hope this helps!
great info! recently had a few spammers on my site, luckly the aski plugin took care of them for me!
Useful info and links, everyone with a domain gets these kinds of problems sooner or later, especially the people who are stuck in shared host environments.
Hi Josh MX lookup is a good tool..
Thanks for the info and tool recommendations. I’ve been pretty lenient on spammers myself, but I think it’s time I get in touch with some of their ISPs.
Thank you for recomendation of this tool. I use akismet against spam, it works good, but your tips will be very useful.
What a very useful information. Someone also had been spamming members of one of my forums. They are humans trying to post their sites which are all porn sites. Josh, Thanks for the Information.
Now you scared me. I thought somebody did something and I might find my sites there. But everything is clear now.
This is awesome information. Also, Subconcious Mind thanks for the info on the aski plugin. I will have to check it out.
Thanks for the neat tool. I need a plug in to stop all my spam.
Within the first two days of my site going up, I was recieving spam. Anyway, thanks for the info!
Nobody likes spam, but are you sure it is actually illegal? I thought all the laws on the books were at the state level, making this legal in many area of the USA… but then again, I might have old information.
Thanks- this is a great tip for stopping spammers.
Sarah Lane, some guys in US and Europe were sued for spamming.
So in some places spam is not allowed.
Many thanks Joshua for sharing this info.
thank you for sharing, that’s great information about spam
Spammers are everywhere. Good thing you have shared this information to me. This is great for my home loan refinance sites. I will use this program and I’m sure spams will be weeded out.
i have faced the spammers a lot, i had to close or sell out a few forums because of the spamming. anyways, nice tips there, i will follow them,
mental note..don’t get on Josh’s bad side cause he’s a beast
; dude that was hardcore that you tracked him down and his provider…good stuff though. Pretty messed up when they private message everyone on a forum. I bookmarked this page for the tool to check for blacklists, thx.
This happened to me on my forum! Someone spammed every single member. I had a few people get really upset. I also figured it out initially because I have a few member accounts and I got emails from that fool. LOL…. wish I would’ve known about how to take care of it then!
Getting your ip removed from certain blacklists can be extremely tedious, and spam has been growing like a wild-fire.
So, this is an critical issue which must be understood by new site owners.
I chased down a hacker/spammer to turkey, notified his isp, webhost and our FBI.
But, with certain countries it seems nothing will work, besides blocking the country’s ip, which is not fool-proof either.
Similarly…
Recently Bush refused to formally declare Turkey responsible for the Armenian genocide which happened between “1915 and 1923, resulting in the deaths of 1.5 million.” Source CNN.com
Why? Cause 70% of our air traffic to Iraq goes through Turkey. Which is not a valid reason for not recognizing the Armenian genocide.
sorry for getting carried away…
You could also contact their ISP, but if they are outside the country blacklist are the only way to go most of the time.
awesome tip. Does this work for spammers outside the US?
great info, thanks! i recently had some spammers on my site, they just kept posting the same thing over and over with a bunch of garbage links. If i had read this article sooner, i would have reported them.
So how bad is it? I mean if you get blacklisted, do you still get a chance to clear things out? What if you were blacklisted accidentally? I mean for no good reason?,,
Handy Tool. I’m also getting a lot of spam email from many discussion boards, since I have joined a lot of forums!
Great tool, I was able to check if one of my sites was blacklisted or if it just fell out of the sandbox. Looks like the latter, now I need to figure this sandbox thing out. I thought it did not exist.
Jens
That was nerve racking. Even though I didn’t have anything to worry about.
Thanks for the advice. I was worried that I had somehow gotten onto one of the spam blacklists because some emails I’m sending lately have been disappearing. But, that’s not the case. Now I just have to figure out what has been happening…
I use this site to check if my domain or my mail server IP is blacklisted
http://www.myiptest.com/staticpages/index.php/check-Blacklisted-IP-DNSBL