Irrational Blacklisting of Blogs by Unaccountable Entities

Neville and I were copied on an email from Steve O'Keefe over at the IAOC in which he said he tried sending out the association's newsletter but it kept bouncing back. The reason, he learned, was the URL for our podcast, "SURBL. According to the SURBL Web site, "SURBLs differ from most other RBLs in that they're used to detect spam based on message body URIs (usually web sites). Unlike most other RBLs, SURBLs are not used to block spam senders. Instead they allow you to block messages that have spam hosts which are mentioned in message bodies." Email spam is at the heart of these blacklists. That confounded Neville and me, since we don't send any email at all from "For Immediate Release." The site, in fact, is a blog. We have an email address so listeners can send us their comments, but when we reply we use our personal email accounts. Not one email has ever been sent from the forimmediaterelease.biz domain. Our guess: somebody spoofed our domain in a spam, although we can't get Outblaze to let us know if that's what happened. Once we got it resolved, which required a flurry of emails, Neville found out his domain, International Association Of Online Communicators Shel Holtz is principal of a shel of my former self