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removal from spam blocklist by payment
Yesterday, the blacklist monitor at MxToolbox notified me that one of my mailserver IPs was just blacklisted by uceprotect-network. When I started to look into this, I was told that it's not my fault, but that I'm living in a bad neighborhood.
Who is responsible for this listing? YOU ARE NOT!. Your IP [removed] was NOT directly involved in aabuse, but has a bad neighborhood. Other customers within this range did not care about their security and got hacked, started spamming, or were even attacking others, while your provider has possibly not even noticed that there is a serious problem. We are sorry for you, but you have chosen an provider not acting fast enough on abusers.
I've heard about systems blocking entire networks or ASs before, but this was the first time I've encountered such a situation myself. As for how to work around this, the site suggests registering at www.whitelisted.org:
We never make exceptions. Requests to us are futile. Only your provider can fix this problem. Anyway our system respects IP's which are registered at ips.whitelisted.org, these are excluded from Level 2.
Since my block was indeed classified as a “level 2” listing I took a look at this site. And I was quite surprised about the registration:
Since your IP wasn't directly involved in abuse, you can exclude your IP from neigborhood blocklists as UCEPROTECT Levels 2 and 3 and others that are importing our whitelist, by registering your IP with us. Registration is available for 1 Month (25 CHF), 6 Month (50 CHF), 12 Month (70 CHF), 24 Month (90 CHF).
Which just means that in order to get off their blocklist for some problem which hasn't anything to do with my system I'm supposed to pay money to this organization. Which, of course, doesn't even go into a single detail what exactly happened.
Luckily, this one is the only blacklist of all the 63 MxTools currently checks against. Also, there are a lot of pages which suggest that such a listing is almost irrelevant, like MailReach which comes to the conclusion that UCEPROTECTL2 has little to no impact on your ability to land in inbox.