Spam Blacklist

Does your company rely on e-mail to conduct business?  Are you sure your corporate e-mail is getting to your customers and clients or is it possible that it is getting routed to a Spam Folder before being delivered.  Currently (2007), over 80% of the e-mail on the internet today is classified as Spam.  It is a huge expense for many corporations.  Many corporate e-mail servers utilize publicly available spam blacklist like: Spamhaus, SpamCop, DNSBL SPAM Blacklist, and SORBS just to name a few.  If your company’s email address appears on one of these lists your corporate email may never reach its destination.

Has Your Company Been Labeled a Spammer?

Some possible events that could result with your company being added to one of these Spam blacklist resulting in your corporate email being blocked might include but are not limited to:

• Changes in marketing, sending higher volumes of email well above your normal monthly or daily email volumes
• Sending emails to individuals that did not request your product information (online e-form completed with invalid and/or incorrect email addresses).
• The recipient of one of your companies emails simply reporting you as a “Spammer” to one of the Blacklists.
• One of the Blacklists determines that someone in your company has ports open allowing their computer to potentially be used as a mail proxy for a Spammer.
• An unwitting employee opens an email and becomes infected with a Trojan that is associated with a known source of Spam.

A common problem that could be detected by monitoring the spam blacklist servers would be when an end user receives a Trojan program which uses the corporate mail servers to send SPAM or copies of itself on to other email systems.  As a result of the mass mailing caused by the virus, a corporate mail server becomes blacklisted.  Other business partners begin to block your email because of the spam blacklist status.  A company needs to know that it has have been blacklisted so it can track down the reason why, fix the problem, and then send an email request to the blacklist administrator that your address range be removed from the spam blacklist. SolarWinds Spam Blacklist application provides that solution.

Spam Blacklist:  Have You been Marked ?

Simply run the SolarWinds Spam Blacklist Application to test your corporate email servers to insure they are not listed in one of the Spam Blacklist Databases.  The SolarWinds Spam Blacklist application ships with connections to over 50 of the top Spam Blacklists on the internet with the ability for you to add additional servers.  Ideally you should run SolarWinds Spam Blacklist application once a week to ensure your company stays off the know blacklists.  In the event someone flags you on one of the list, Solarwinds provides detailed information as to why you are on the Spam Blacklist as well as a direct link to the blacklist provider’s web site which provides information on how to be request to be removed from their list. It only takes a couple seconds to determine if you are on a Spam blacklist.  Getting off of the list can take a couple hours or a couple days; not that you are on one of the lists could cost your company thousands.

SolarWinds Spam Blacklist Evaluation

The trial version of the SolarWinds Spam Blacklist application ships with a preloaded list of corporate email servers.  The application runs in real time so the ‘preloaded’ servers may or may not be present on any blacklist at the time of the test.  Our sample is broad enough with today’s high volume of Spam one or more are usually on one of the negative files.  While this may be interesting the real question, to more important question is are you listed on one of the Spam Blacklist Servers?

Additional Security and Discovery Software

The SolarWinds Engineer’s Edition Toolset is a collection of 49 network management applications and utilities designed by network engineers, for network engineers.  This network management toolset contains applications for fault and performance monitoring, discovery and mapping, and configuration and compliance.  Download a free evaluation version of the Engineer’s Network Management Toolset to see more tools on security and network management.

SolarWinds Spam Blacklist tool allows testing of all IP addresses of mail servers and verifies that the mail servers have not been blacklisted. DNS Blacklists are a popular tool used by e-mail administrators to help block reception of SPAM into their mail systems.

A DNS Blacklist server maintains a database of IP addresses which have been sources of SPAM. The idea is if an IP address has sent SPAM in the past, it will be likely to send more SPAM in the future.

By configuring mail servers to consult DNS Blacklists before accepting an email message, e-mail administrators can block a large percentage of incoming SPAM.

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