Irish techies — wondering what the next website to put the fear into your parents will be? Here it is: Blacklist.ie. It’s been getting a bit of coverage from the Irish technology press recently, it seems, as the new site from IE Internet.
(IE Internet are the Irish internet company that puts a press release every month or so telling us how much of their mail is being filtered as spam, which Silicon Republic et al dutifully report as news, month after month.)
I got a call from my mother last week, telling me that she’d been “blacklisted”, and asking how to fix it. Sure enough, when I found out that she’d heard this on blacklist.ie, I went to the site, and her IP address was indeed listed — as was mine:
The IP address 212.2.169.61 is blacklisted.
RBLs checked:
Spam Haus not listed
Spam Cop not listed
Mailwall RBL not listed
Abuse At not listed
SORBS not listed
NJABL listed: Dynamic/Residential IP range listed by NJABL dynablock – http://njabl.org/dynablock.html
510 SG not listed
Naturally, that IP is listed — it’s entirely ok for a home-user broadband machine to appear in SORBS or NJABL as a dynablock-listed IP. (Dynablock, for those who don’t know, is a set of records for addresses which are known to be residential/end-user “dynamic” addresses, rather than mail relays — so obviously most end-user desktop machines would fall under this category.)
Unfortunately, this distinction isn’t mentioned anywhere on the blacklist.ie page… just a large, red, “The IP address is blacklisted” warning.
Worried readers might then reasonably go on to read the site’s Frequently Asked Questions list — which, incredibly, includes a helpful suggestion that you sign up with IE Internet to avoid being listed in future! I’d be curious how that’s supposed to help a home user get off the NJABL dynablock list… a little fishy, if you ask me!
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