> I had to deal with keeping my server out of over-enthusiastic spam blacklists
My domain got blacklisted once. I contacted the service concerned (i.e. the people running the blacklist) and they said my web domain had appeared in the footer of a spam email.
"So, do you have any evidence I put it there, or paid someone to put it there?"
"No."
"So you'll blacklist random domains a spammer puts in their email? Because that's what happened here."
I was surprised (and still am) that this kind of service could be so naive. My domain was literally just a bare http://domain.com/ in the footer, no link or advertising associated with it at all. Domain blacklist successfully polluted, as far as the spammer was concerned.
Sounds like negative SEO. I remember reading about one particular spam tool "XRumer" which would register fake forum posts and run amok spamming for SEO backlinks. Google caught up and running xrumer became almost a guarantee for being de-listed. Of course, the logical conclusion to all this is bad guys turning the tool against their competitors. A random story from googling xrumer negative seo is this story about blackmail threatening to spam the victim's URL: http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/11499...
I think it's a mistake to think of this as a long-standing policy for a spam blacklist. They are constantly evolving, just as the spam is, and there will be hiccups and problems as new detection techniques come online. At one point, identifying all domains listed in the content of definitively identified spam might have been very useful. Then spammers could have realized this and started peppering their content with random domains to poison this technique. In the short time between this technique being poisoned and discontinued (in this hypothetical scenario), quite a few people were probably affected, and while it was a short period, it would probably also account for 99% of the problems related to this.
My domain got blacklisted once. I contacted the service concerned (i.e. the people running the blacklist) and they said my web domain had appeared in the footer of a spam email.
"So, do you have any evidence I put it there, or paid someone to put it there?"
"No."
"So you'll blacklist random domains a spammer puts in their email? Because that's what happened here."
I was surprised (and still am) that this kind of service could be so naive. My domain was literally just a bare http://domain.com/ in the footer, no link or advertising associated with it at all. Domain blacklist successfully polluted, as far as the spammer was concerned.