ahbl blocking godaddy

Shark

Verified User
Joined
Aug 8, 2005
Messages
57
Location
Ohio
Hey Everyone,

Recently (june 2nd) we started getting complaints of emails getting blocked from our clients. Long story, short- it is ahbl tagging secureserver.net (godaddy) email. Looking up some IPs in any blacklist reveals:

AHBL LISTED GoDaddy - Continued hosting of FreeSpeechStore hate website

At first it was only a few emails so whitelisting was no problem. Now it's becoming more of a problem so we have temporarily commented-out ahbl from exim.conf/spamblocker.

Looking for everyone's 2cents. Is ahbl a reliable blacklist? I see on their website it is "their opinion" to block IPs but kind of a weird reason to blacklist a HUGE network of IPs/email. Your thoughts?

Dave~

EDIT: hmmmmmm reading up about ahbl and who owns it, it's starting to make sense!
 
Last edited:
EDIT: hmmmmmm reading up about ahbl and who owns it, it's starting to make sense!
Nevertheless when we started using AHBL our tests made it seem reasonable.

However, they consider registration of a domain name to be abusive.

Considering that GoDaddy may very well feel they're under contractual obligation to host the registration until their attorneys can make a determination, the ahbl list may be too aggressive for most of us to use. I'll be doing some more testing, and will probably remove it as a regular blocklist.

Jeff
 
Yes - avoid

Definitely stay away from these turkeys. What they tell you on their web site, and what they actually do under the surface are 2 very different things.

This is one mans hobby hate-list dressed up to look like an anti-spam service.

They list sites on their own whim, they do not check or require evidence to establish listings, they never keep or provide evidence to substantiate their listings, and even if you prove they don't have any policy in place to justify a listing - they still refuse to remove it (if they even reply at all).

You get a pretty good idea of how far beyond the law they all realize they're operating at from every page on their site - you've got to sign a disclaimer not to sue them just to look at their stuff, they rub your nose in their idea of why they're above the law, and they operate a "complain and we will destroy you in public" retaliation system.

This is not the behavior you want to filter your own or your customer emails against!
 
I've done a bit of research. I'm going to remove ahbl blocklists from the master SpamBlocker 4 within the next few days. I no longer recommend using it, simply because they're no longer transparent in what they do.

Edit Jan 9, 2011:
I never did the deletion. Simply forgot.

@Shark:

If you can give me more information on what you found, I'd appreciate it. Until then I have no choice but to ignore your post, and do my own research and checking.

@abuse.bot:

I've finally realized that you most likely are simply a bot, although who you are remains beyond my grasp or concern.

But in case you are a real live person, I make the same offer to you that I make to Shark:

Please feel free to give me some details and links.

And now, for all readers:

I've decided to be a bit more transparent on how I reached my previous decision, especially in consideration of my post defending my whitelist solution, in another thread).

My biggest concern at that time was finding out here, and elsewhere on the 'net, that AHBL was blocking GoDaddy. And by now we probably all know I don't recommending blocking ISPs or hosting providers. And I know my clients need to be able to receive email from servers owned by GoDaddy.

I admit I didn't check the date of any of those complaints about GoDaddy. But I did today. Some of them are quite recent. as discussed here here (godaddy.com) on the GoDaddy community form. There's an interesting and eye-opening reply on page 2 of this thread, from Brielle from AHBL, explaining their take on the discussion.

There's an interesting article of this on Al Iverson's Spam Resource (spamresource.com).

Who's right? As long as I don't get complaints about spam from GoDaddy, but do get complaints when their mail is blocked, I don't care.

And the easiest way to solve that problem is to whitelist GoDaddy servers. until and unless I see some reasons to do otherwise, I can leave the blocklists alone.

I haven't been able to find a list of godaddy outgoing mail servers; I'm presuming our current whitelist system (several local list and two DNS-based whitelists) is doing it's job.

Jeff
 
Sorry Jeff,

Never saw this post! Probably forgot the "There may also be other replies, but you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the forum again". I'm not sure what information you were looking for or if it even matters 6 months later.

I have a godaddy account besides several servers and accounts on major providers- more for knowledge than anything else. I was getting complaints of email not getting to my users. When I looked into it, I found they were all godaddy emails being blocked by AHBL and all legitimate business emails. Tallying up some numbers I found AHBL wasn't really blocking much so it was an easy decision to comment them out of exim.conf.

Havn't looked back until now because nikki posted- and seemingly got deleted for spam...
 
Yeah, well... that happens.

We now do use ahbl, and it is in the master. We whitelist whole blocks of godaddy space, finding it starting it by looking up txt records for spf.secureserver.net, and then continuing through all the includes.

In the last 4-1/2 weeks ahbl has blocked for us 198 emails, 23 of which were from servers with secureserver.net in their hostnames.

We might block less if we put ahbl at the bottom, and then we might decide to drop them completely.


Should I check that? Perhaps.

But for right now, it works for us.

Jeff
 
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