Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus

I work at Yahoo! and we've been blacklisted as well by Spamhaus. I wouldn't say it's entirely inappropriate because of the sheer volume of email that can pass through our (or in this case Gmail's) system.<p>Personally, I've tried to reach out to Google regarding security issues on blogspot which were affecting our property. There was an XSS vulnerability and we were getting thousands of posts on our blog linking to blogspot which would in turn redirect the user to some pharma site.<p>It's been months and they haven't really made any progress other than put me in contact with various people who don't respond to email.<p>If that's how they deal with an open XSS I can only imagine how fast they move to deal with spam like this.<p>Disclaimer: This isn't a post bashing Google and praising Yahoo - just the only experiences I've had to contribute to this post :).

Spamhaus is the most rabid group of extreme anti-spammer teenagers out there (or at least they act like teenagers).<p>I've had various SMTP servers (for various companies) blocked by them, usually for very questionable reasons. You used to have to argue with them on their forum (and take a beating from all of the kids on that site) before they'd remove you.<p>The result is that SMTP admins get it from both sides: Spammers make your life hard, rabid blackhole lists combatting spammers make your life even harder.

... but wholesale DNS-based blacklisting could never blow up in our faces. Noooooo sir.

Seems like it might be biting off a bit more than they can chew.<p>Given the choice between the service Spamhaus' list provides, and being able to receive mail from what's undoubtedly one of the largest webmail providers in the world (<i>the</i> biggest?), a lot of people are going to can Spamhaus.<p>I'd hope that Google will react by doing something about the spam, but they could much more easily do nothing, put out some recommendation that people stop using Spamhaus, and a lot of people will be forced to do just that (or Spamhaus will blink and un-blacklist Google). They're the 800-pound gorilla in this particular match; Spamhaus isn't a lightweight but I wouldn't put any money on them in that fight.

Oh Spamhaus, everybody who's ever had the joy of operating an SMTP agent loves them.

The report website at Spamhaus: <a href="http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL95011" rel="nofollow">http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL95011</a><p>Some more (older): <a href="http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=google.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=google.com</a>

Does anyone know if this affects Postini?<p>We've switched once already this month - our new office was assigned an IP by C&#38;W business that is in the same block as thousands of Virgin home cable-modems, so we got blacklisted by Spamhaus and others. Management got quite twitchy so I moved all the outgoing email to go via our Postini account which was previously only filtering incoming. Don't fancy having to find a third option now.

Yeah, this is why I don't use Spamhaus blacklists.

SpamHaus has listed various gmail servers loads of times for short periods of time.<p>It's a good idea to maintain a local whitelist, or use DNSWL.org or <a href="http://wiki.junkemailfilter.com/index.php/Spam_DNS_Lists" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.junkemailfilter.com/index.php/Spam_DNS_Lists</a>

Such solutions as this is like you have a headache, and in order to cure the pain you cut your head...

If I'm using Google Apps for my domain, does this mean I'll have worse deliverability on my email?

Spamhaus have listed the web servers for docs.google.com NOT gmail's outbound SMTP servers. Mail from gmail is not affected.