Web Hosting Blog By Leading Edge Hosting

Anti-spam

Several of our customers have been in touch over the past few months wondering why they can’t send email through our systems.

In literally 95% of these cases, it’s because they have somehow been allocated an IP address that is tagged as belonging to a spammer.

Leading Edge Hosting use what’s called a DNSBL, which is a blocklist (blacklist) of IP addresses, shared over the Internet. Their are several blocklists, maintained by different companies, but we use the blocklist provided by www.spamhaus.org

If you find that you cannot send email through our servers, it’s worth checking that your IP address has not been blacklisted. To do this, first find your IP address then visit this link and type in your IP address. If your IP address is listed you are probably being blocked by our server.

If you need to absolutely confirm that our servers are blocking your IP address, an alternative method is to open a Windows command prompt, type: telnet and press enter. The command prompt should change, now open a telnet connection to our servers from your PC by typing: o 123.123.123.123 25

But replace 123.123.123.123 with your IP address (find it using the link above). If the server reports a message that mentions Spamhaus, consider yourself blocked.

So what should you do if you are blocked? Well, spamhaus.org provide facilities to request a de-listing of your IP address, so follow their on-screen instructions, but be careful. Most of the time, when an IP address is blocked, it is because it has been detected sending spam emails. 9 times out of 10 I would imagine that this is because your PC(s) have been, or are, infected with a trojan or virus that is sending spam on your behalf.

We highly recommend using the FREE online virus scanner provided by ActiveScan: http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/activescan/