Spamhaus IP and Domain Reputation Checker

epiz_27501099

(please specify the website or account you are asking about)

I cannot use my normal email to send messages containing an IF URL as they are treated as spam, and rejected. If anyone sends me an email containing an IF URL that goes to my Spam folder. So I have to use a gmail account in these cases. It appears this is due to my regular email provider using Spamhaus. I have tried to take this up with Spamhaus but they will not deal with me, they will only deal with the owner of IF. According to the support database this problem was resolved in 2019, however it seems to have recurred.

(please share the FULL error message you see)

Here it is in full:

Ticketing Center

Domain: infinityfreeapp.com

No: ST1523478
Opened: 27 Feb 2022
Status: Open

Welcome to the removals ticketing center.

All communications regarding the removal of infinityfreeapp.com can be found here. To send a message to the delisting team simply type into the “new message” box below. They will respond as soon as possible.

Latest correspondence

Re

01 MAR 2022

03:55:40

Thank you for contacting Spamhaus DBL Removals,

Since you do not own infinityfreeapp.com, we cannot proceed.
THEY will have to do something.

We cannot confirm from the information provided that the author is authoritative for infinityfreeapp[.]com. Some things that can be done to help us resolve listings include:

associated with infinityfreeapp[.]com, and do not use a VPN

  • Use an email address which can easily be associated with infinityfreeapp[.]com

  • Provide information in the ticket that makes the requestor’s authority over infinityfreeapp[.]com clear

  • Provide information in the ticket that shows the issue(s) have been resolved

  • Reference any other Spamhaus removal ticket numbers related to this case.

DBL listings expire a few days after last detection. You can always open a ticket (or update an existing one) to inform us when and how the situation was been secured.

Regards,
Re

New message

Please provide details regarding the issue*
New message

Full name*

John James Ford

Submit

Previous correspondence

John James Ford

JJF 28 FEB 2022

09:25:19

I placed a link to this Removal Center at https://www.essendonbells.great-site.net/links/ and have opened this ticket using this link. Is that what you wanted? I cannot send an email to you from Infinityfree as they do not provide email addresses for free accounts.

Re

Spamhaus
28 FEB 2022

01:47:07

Thank you for contacting Spamhaus DBL Removals,

Please use https://translate.google.com/for language, if needed.

We cannot confirm from the information provided that the author is authoritative for infinityfreeapp[.]com. Some things that can be done to help us resolve listings include:

  • Open removal tickets on our Removal Center (https: /check.spamhaus.org) from an IP address that can be

associated with infinityfreeapp[.]com, and do not use a VPN

  • Use an email address which can easily be associated with infinityfreeapp[.]com

  • Provide information in the ticket that makes the requestor’s authority over infinityfreeapp[.]com clear

  • Provide information in the ticket that shows the issue(s) have been resolved

  • Reference any other Spamhaus removal ticket numbers related to this case.

DBL listings expire a few days after last detection. You can always open a ticket (or update an existing one) to inform us when and how the situation was been secured.

Regards,
Re

Hide full *message /*

John James Ford
27 FEB 2022

15:31:37

Any emails I try to send from the address above that include the URL https://www.essendonbells.great-site.net/ fail. I have to use Google Email to send these messages which is inconvenient. As I am the administrator and created the web site I know that it does not have harmful content. Also, from time to time I receive automated advice emails from InfinityFree that are completely legitimate but they get treated as spam, so I have to retrieve them from Junk. All very irritating as there is no harmful content at all. And no one has any problem accessing the web site - it is just email that thinks there is something wrong with it.

Hide full message /•

Other Information

(other information and details relevant to your question)

Um, just use your Gmail address and use its SMTP.

Yes I can use my gmail address. Replies are then forwarded to my regular email where they go into the Spam folder. And people ask me “have you changed your email” because they get emails from a different address. It’s all very inconvenient and prone to error. The proper solution to this is for IF to get delisted by Spamhaus.

I don’t think the admin would do that just for you.

This came up as a topic in 2019 and was subsequently closed. So my email isn’t the only one affected, and presumably the problem was addressed then. In any case surely it isn’t in the interest of IF to be listed as hosting spam.

Note that some email providers (like gmail) will always mark an email as spam if it comes from the same name but a different domain. There is nothing you can do about that.

No, it really is not. However, IF was marked as spam to begin with because people abused email. Note that you are not the only one on that subdomain, there are thousands. And if one person spams, it affects everyone. And if IF gets the domain listed as not spam, it only takes one person to reverse that.

The best way to avoid this is to buy your own domain, .com domains run for less than $10 a year.

3 Likes

Unfortunately we don’t have a budget for our own domain. But as there is no email (No more free email account?) I don’t see how that can be the cause of the problem. I’m hoping that IF will take some action to identify and remove spam generating sites if they exist and demonstrate to Spamhaus that they can be delisted.

You can get a free domain from Freenom

You can keep waiting. I doubt it will happen as it is logistically impossible to police all sites

4 Likes

It’s a problem because the email domain is still InfinityFreeapp.net. Any spam coming from any subdomains will affect everyone on the domain.

I’ve had domains listed by Spamhaus in the past, and getting that resolved was consistently an extremely unpleasant experience.

Spamhaus appears to hate free hosting providers. They tend to say things like “we will only delist your domain if you make sure that no bad content can ever be published on it again”. Which is just impossible when you’re giving our free subdomains to people and not in control of the content being published on it.

So for now, I support the recommendation to just get your own domain name.

Not quite. This listing is far more recent. I know that, because it got listed before half a year ago, which could be resolved then.

This mostly has to do with bad websites being hosted on the domain. Spamhaus is mostly about email, but they also look at malicious links shared in emails.

2 Likes

I’m not surprised that dealing with Spamhaus is unpleasant, or that they don’t like free sites. However they have apparently identified that IF hosts malicious links. I guess there isn’t any way of stopping people from creating a website and putting malicious links on it; whether the site is paid or free.
Maybe Spamhaus would be satisfied if IF showed that it operates a process to check the sites it hosts for malicious links and closes them down if found.

There are two issues with the free hosting subdomains:

  • Because the hosting is free, it’s really easy for criminals to anonymously setup many accounts. With paid hosting, the criminal would need to submit a payment first, which either makes them easily traceable by law enforcement, or they have to steal credit card data first. For free hosting, all you need is an email address.
  • Abuse reports tend to be grouped by domain. So if there are 100k sites on infinityfreeapp.com, and 0.1% of them is bad, that’s 100 bad sites on the domain. 100 bad sites on a single domain is a lot, “therefore infinityfreeapp.com must be bad”.

I wish.

These companies tend to work with an X strikes program. Say 3 bad sites found on the domain results in a ban. Then it doesn’t matter that our own abuse protection measures took down 30.000 other sites before they were ever published. Three bad sites were published, therefore the domain is bad.

I’ve had companies block stuff of InfintyFree immediately after receiving the report, without giving us any chance to do a more targeted takedown. I’ve had companies block stuff after we had already blocked the content ourselves (we process many reports within minutes, others sometimes take hours). I’ve even had stuff blocked because of abuse that happened half a year before, has long since been deleted, but “there was bad content, so we must take action”.

I must admit some hypocrisy here because we also shoot first and ask questions later when it comes to abuse.

But the eagerness of some companies to take down tens of thousands of legitimate sites because there is one bad one is painful.

3 Likes

OK thanks for the explanation. I would rather have the pain of messing with emails than the pain of having to change domain every year. Other than this little problem IF works fine; no one has reported any problem accessing our site.

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.