Hello, I'm Dan Thies. I've been writing about, teaching, and practicing search engine optimization for over 12 years.
In spite of what you may have heard, SEO is very simple. If you don't believe that, then you really need to read my book! It's only 100 pages long, and it's free.
Sphinn Assassinated by SpamAssassin
After mentioning Sphinn in a recent newsletter as a great place to keep up with the latest buzz in search, I was surprised when AWeber sent me a report that several ISPs were blocking my newsletter based on the content.
After doing a little research I discovered that SURBL (a database which feeds several tools including SpamAssassin) has Sphinn.com on a list of "spamvertised" domains. Apparently, after receiving enough SpamCop complaints about emails that happen to contain a domain name in the content, SURBL decides that any message mentioning that domain must be spam.
I hate these SURBL guys. I really do. They haven't done a damn thing to keep me from getting a ton of spam every day, but they block legitimate emails without any investigation or notification. If you use SpamAssassin, I recommend configuring it to ignore this worthless blacklist, better yet, uninstall it and filter your emails at the client. It works better.
I "went Mac" a few weeks ago, and the amount of spam I have to manually delete is down to only a few a day. I get a false positive every few days on the Apple Mail client… which has been pretty much flawless after a couple weeks training for the Junk Mail filter.
Blacklists don't work, and bad guys can exploit them to hurt the good guys, like Danny Sullivan & Sphinn.
Filed under Blog by 
Leave a Comment
Comments on Sphinn Assassinated by SpamAssassin
I just posted this over at Sphinn but thought I would also post here you (or Danny) can attempt to be white listed information is hidden in their appalling web site http://www.surbl.org/lists.html#removal Maybe if some one offered to organise their site they might white list their sites quicker?
I hate all of these black list cock smokers. I have a site with over 40,000 confirmed opt ins. They sent a complaint to my isp claiming I had sent an email to one of their "email honey pots" proving I was a spammer.
It is impossible for me to have a honey pot email on my list unless someone confirmed it. Most of the emails on my lists have already placed an order, so I could provide the name, address, etc of the person the email belonged to. They refused to release the email address so I could prove to my isp the email address was a confirmed subscribe.
First, if I was going to send spam, I'd be sending to a heck of a lot more than 40K emails. I wouldn't include my office number and address in the message, and I wouldn't include a method to unsubscribe.
I actually visited the message boards of this black list to try and get info on how I could remove this honey pot address. Their suggestion was to erase my entire database and start over. They were a bunch of jerks.
What good have they done? I get over 1,000 junk emails filtered to my junk folder every frickin day.
I think you hit a nerve with me on this subject
Your host may have also installed RBL (Real-time Blackhole List) which uses spamcop, sorbs and spamhaus. You may want to entirely deinstall or uncheck those that are sloppy about listing legitimate IPs.
our host may have also installed RBL (Real-time Blackhole List) which uses spamcop, sorbs and spamhaus. You may want to entirely deinstall or uncheck those that are sloppy about listing legitimate IPs.