There is a typo in their title. If intentional please instead consider words like block reject and deny for the people that do not speak English as a first language.
I've dealt with real time blocklists as long as they have existed. They are not going away any time soon. I agree that the paid exception lists are a bit shady but I also see the validity of their methods of temporarily punishing everyone on a hosts network to put pressure on the ISP/platform provider to police it's own network and remove spammers. The best one can do today aside from securing ones own server is to research an ISP's IP space ahead of time to see how dirty they are. There are plenty of providers that cleaned up their act some time ago. Linode is a great example of change. New accounts can't even send email unless they open a ticket and prove they made some effort to comply with can-spam. More providers need to follow that example so that we don't run into this problem of dirty networks that real time block-lists like UceProtect have listed. It's an imperfect solution to an old ugly problem.
Yeah except we've had this recently with Linode's IP range landing on that exact blacklist and being blocked by Microsoft and other major mail providers, knocking out our ability to send to huge chunks of our customers. I've had to get the mail server moved off Linode to another hosting company as paying the ransom fee did nothing. UceProtect does seem at least as morally dubious if not more so that the spammers it alleges to protect against.
Which other major provider uses this list? Uceprotect is attempting to racket me from time to time. While I'm blocked i try different providers to guess the ones using this, I only found Hotmail blocking me.
Unfortunately we were being blocked by all Microsoft mail services so outlook.com but also anyone using hosted 365, exchange etc. which in our case meant a lot of our enterprise and public sector customers. Also NHS.net mail and a lot of large hospital groups in Europe (APHP etc.)
Ditto here. It is ironic because I actually recommended outlook.com over gmail.com for my non-techie friends, because outlook.com was more lenient, at least 2 years ago. Gmail is using some invisible reputation crap that shovel my emails to the jink folder from time to time. Now outlook.com just did the one-up and start using UCEPROTECTL2/3.
That's a tough question to answer. This is very much a moving target. I suppose if I were to generalize an answer it would be something to the effect of
- A dedicated server provider that has been around for a while and has a strict AUP and is known to enforce it.
- A hosting provider that is not entry-level in cost. Spammers gravitate towards cheap throw-away ephemeral solutions.
- A hosting provider that verifies identity of its customers. e.g. Dunn and Bradstreet lookup for commercial customers. Video conference meeting for individual customers and commercial customers and that have mutually signed contracts.
Short of that if you just want to use a VPS provider then I would look up their AS number of a prospective provider, get all their CIDR blocks and start validating their IP addresses against the numerous RBL/RSL sites. AFAIK there is not a good database of this. Good RBL/RSL sites will remove listings after a week or two. One could even open a ticket with a VPS provider and state your intentions to run a mail server, explain your process to deal with spam and ask for an IP from a clean subnet.
On the very low end of that spectrum of managed/dedicated server providers would be Rackspace but I have heard it may not be as good there any more. On the high end of the spectrum would be IBM but that is very expensive. In between are various managed server providers. Just look for managed hosting and what you would actually want to research is who their customers are. Or look at it the other way around. Find medium sized companies and research who their managed hosting providers are.
Another method would be to look at colocation providers. They can give you blocks of IP space. On the low end would be Hurricane Electric if you are on the west coast. A step up from there would be Sonic. There are a myriad of colocation providers that scale up in price from there. If you wanted a presence in many locations then Equinix may be a good option though they can be expensive when you are first starting out. All of these providers have partnerships with network providers and can help get you peering arrangements, address space and much more.
It's "blacklist" in most languages though so the non-standard "block list" would be probably more confusing to non-native speakers. Anyway they clearly meant blacklist.
Blocking outgoing port 25 unless going through an extra step is IMHO against the spirit of the internet, and would make operating a personal email server harder than necessary. The world of email is already too centralized as it is.
I completely agree. I believe the commonly used phrase is and this is why we can't have nice things. The open and decentralized internet is also open to people with ill intent. We can solve things with technical solutions, monetary solutions and/or legislative solutions. All of these are double edged swords and have varying degrees of effectiveness and unintended side effects in my opinion.
I don't really know what the right solution should have been that would have made everyone happy minus the people with ill intent.
I've dealt with real time blocklists as long as they have existed. They are not going away any time soon. I agree that the paid exception lists are a bit shady but I also see the validity of their methods of temporarily punishing everyone on a hosts network to put pressure on the ISP/platform provider to police it's own network and remove spammers. The best one can do today aside from securing ones own server is to research an ISP's IP space ahead of time to see how dirty they are. There are plenty of providers that cleaned up their act some time ago. Linode is a great example of change. New accounts can't even send email unless they open a ticket and prove they made some effort to comply with can-spam. More providers need to follow that example so that we don't run into this problem of dirty networks that real time block-lists like UceProtect have listed. It's an imperfect solution to an old ugly problem.