What are blacklists?
There are many blacklists around the world, and these lists are used reduce load on email systems and improve spam, virus and email garbage detection.
Unfortunately, these lists are not perfect as some list the sending server, others list the senders domain etc. So if you share an email service with a spammer you could be listed by mistake.
So basically a blacklist is a list of email servers, domains and people who have been reported to have been sending spam, viruses or similar content.
Improving the results
We are always looking to improve the results of blacklists by contributing back to them, and companies doing this help improve spam detection without the need of many complex detection rules.
Due to many shared platforms like Office 365, Google, GoDaddy and many other major hosting companies. These blacklists do capture good emails as well, as they could be sharing the same resources as a spammer.
For September we have introduced a big upgrade to our spam service. This upgrade splits all our clients into profiles. These “profiles” enable us to apply filtering settings to just your emails only. As part of these settings we now have white and black lists for each client enabling us to improve results.
Our platform and service will still have global blacklists we use, as well as the hundreds of rules we are always improving. But now we also have our own blacklists and more importantly a whitelist on a per customer basis.
How does this effect us?
Our black/white lists have the highest priority when classifying emails, meaning what we say is final.
If you look at our email detection now, we have the following priority: –
- Strobe IT Blacklist/Whitelist
- Global Blacklists
- Detection Rules
With us having the overriding say it gives us flexibility to aid you greater were a client might be using the same shared platform as a spammer meaning we can add temporary whitelists for them and more.
Who is responsible for getting off Strobe IT’s blacklist
Where a traditional blacklists is 100% down to the sender to resolve, we are not that strict. We understand that not all senders realise they are on blacklists that are otherwise known as “RBLs”.
If a client of ours has an issue with a customer being listed we will accept communication from them to get this looked at and possibly removed.
Unfortunately we still do not control all blocklists out there and suggest anyone using email should always work to stay off the following lists: –
- Composite Blocking list (CBL) – www.abuseat.org
- Spamhaus Black List (SBL) – www.spamhaus.org
- Exploits Block List (XBL) – www.spamhaus.org
- SpamCop Blocking List (SCBL) – www.spamcop.net
- Passive Spam Block List (PSBL) – psbl.org
- Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL) – barracudacentral.org
- Sender Score – www.senderscore.org
- Comodo KoruMail Reputation Network (KRN) – tools.korumail.com
- anonmails – anonmails.de
- Spa and Open Relay Blocking System (SORBS) – www.sorbs.net