Broadband: Blacklisted IP addresses from your ISP?

Blacklisted IP addresses from your ISP?

It came to my attention that many of the IP addresses that my service provider (BT Broadband) allocates to me by DHCP are listed in Spam Blacklist databases such as dnsbl.sorbs.net.

The result of this is that many of the emails I sent (none of which are spam) never reached their destinations - they were identified as spam because if the blacklisted IP address and junked.

I did some research on the problem, and it turns out that almost 1 in 4 of the IP addresses in the /16 subnet from which BT allocates my IP address are blacklisted. BT customer services and technical support were unhelpful, and SORBS have yet to respond to my inquiries.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? The chances are that many people have, but never knew it - their emails just don't arrive sometimes.

While I support efforts to reduce spam (like SORBS), I would like to raise awareness of this problem so that ISPs and spam blacklist maintaners start to work together to clear down dynamic IP ranges whenever a DHCP lease expires.

The consequence of no action is that the blacklists will cause too many false spam IDs and will cease to be useful - something that only helps the spammers.

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Matthew Gates
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