Ironically, the problem of spam has created another weird problem. I'm not sure what's the right kind of thing to describe them, so I'll call them the ambulance chasers of the email world. But that doesn't sound right. Some kind of leech, patent troll, and mafia rolled into one?<p>Last week, one of my organization's user email accounts was hacked. It started getting used to send out spam. We caught it pretty quickly and updated the password so that the spammers couldn't use it anymore. But it was too late, we got listed on several spam blacklists. As such, all emails from our mail server started going into recipient mailbox spam folders. OK, we just get ourselves off of the spam blacklists, right?<p>Most of the spam blacklists gave us one of two options. First option was to manually request removal, some of them required sending an email to confirm what had happened and why we're confident the problem didn't exist anymore. Easy. Second option was to wait as their service monitored our email services to confirm if we were still sending out spam. If after a few days they confirmed that the spammy behaviour had stopped, we'd be automatically removed from their blacklist. Annoying wait, but reasonable methodology.<p>Then the annoying ones. One spam blacklist would not remove us for a week, though we could expedite the process by paying them $106 USD. Otherwise, we have a week of going into people's spam folders. It's a friggin racket. Dare I say even extortion? The other annoying spam blacklist said that we could not get removed from their list because we were on several other spam blacklists, including the blacklists that required us to wait a few days for them to monitor our email behaviour, AND the spam blacklist that wanted us to wait a week if we didn't pay $106 USD. So we're on one spam blacklist for a week due to not willing to pay extortion fees, and on the other spam blacklist for a week because they're too meta to develop their own spam blacklisting mechanisms and just follow what other blacklists are doing. The meta blacklist annoys me more than the extortioner. Why are they checking whether we're on other spam blacklists? They should be depending purely on their own capability to identify spammers, not the capability of other organizations. Why do they even exist? There's no value added by being meta here.<p>It really annoys me.