AT&T rbl block inquiry site
First, I guess I should give a primer, what’s an RBL? RBL stands for Realtime Black List (or Realtime Block List depending on who you talk to.) The idea is there are machines that either 1) have no business DIRECTLY trying to deliver a mail message to a legitimate mail server or 2) are known to spew out junk mail, or viruses or other bad content. So, many service providers make use of blacklists to decline messages from suspect machines. In some cases these lists are cultivated in house, in other cases people make use of various publicly available lists online.
But…
These lists block IP addresses from sending mail, what if you’re webhost is simply forwarding mail on to your ISP account and the ISP then blames your webhost’s machine for this spam? Or more likely, what if your website is sharing an IP address with other websites (Name based hosting) and one of those is sending out junk. Or, even still… your ISP decides it’s time to launch a new outbound mail machine and they pull an address from a block of addresses that used to be reserved for dial up users. In any of these cases, the end result is your mail doesn’t get from point A (you) to point B (your recipient), and the machine along the way rejects the message.
So… several weeks ago I ran into problems with mail FROM bellsouth(at&t) mailservers getting blocked due to the ip’s of the mail servers formerly being in the dynamic ip space….
well I also ran into problems with AT&T (@bellsouth.net address) blocking inbound mail from a particular site and was lucky enough to be helped with the following link where you can request delisting from AT&T’s blacklist. It’s a handy link to have on hand. I’ve needed it once again for another site since the first inquiry I sent to AT&T.