River of Stars: Spam Block List Info

Anti-spam blocks

You were referred here by an error message from our mail server. Unfortunately, the network or domain through which you sent your mail is on one or more of the sets of lists our users can individually select to help protect their mailboxes against the steadily rising tide of chickenboner, mainsleaze, and listbomb spam they would otherwise receive.

At their option, our users can employ one of the following packages to help protect their mailboxes from spam:

  1. Minimal Blocks: protect only against some misconfigured open proxies and relays.
  2. Light Blocks: adds local lists of bad actors, and some pro-spam networks and domains
  3. Regular Blocks: adds more pro-spam networks and domains, and free email providers overrun with spammers
  4. Strong Blocks: adds hosts that lie about their names when connecting, and hosts that do not have working administrative addresses or contacts
  5. BOFH Blocks: adds more providers and some entire countries that are common sources of spam
  6. No False Negatives Blocks: adds everything

By default, most of our users employ the Regular Blocks.

Getting through to a spam blocked River of Stars customer:

You have a couple options for getting a blocked message through to an individual address. They are, in decreasing order of what is best over the long term for both you and the Internet:

  1. Have your ISP or staff fix the misconfiguration or spammer hosting problem that caused the listing.
  2. Send your messages from a properly configured or not-spam network instead, avoiding misconfigured hosts and spam friendly systems.
  3. Call your correspondent on the telephone and ask them to whitelist your sending address, or lower their spam blocking level.

Fixing the problem

In order to fix the problem, you need to know which lists your sending system is on. Please visit the specific URLs referenced in the bounce message you received, or see the URL for the relevant block list in the specifics section below. Follow the instructions at the relevant block list site for getting your network or domain cleaned up.

If you are unsure of which one has you listed, or suspect your system or network may be listed by more than one, you can query many block lists at once using one of these convenient lookup services:

You can also check our local domain, network and free provider block lists.

Once you have fixed the problem that has your network or domain listed, you will again be able to get your mail through to our users.

Even better, in the case of the shared lists, after you fix the problem you will also be able to get your mail through to other organizations that use the same lists.

Working around the problem

However, if you can't clean the problem up (perhaps because the only ISP in your area is TPC [the phone company] and you lack the leverage to get it to behave in a more neighborly manner), you still have a couple options.

You may be able to reach your correspondent by sending through a different mail server that is properly configured, or that isn't on a spam friendly network.

If that fails, you should contact the person you're trying to reach out of band (via telephone, or perhaps postal mail), and ask them to let your mail in anyway. They can do that by:

Good ways to contact them with such requests include using the phone, or sending from an alternate address on a not-spam domain and network.

If you have further questions, or if your network or domain is not in the DNS-based lists, but is in our local list and you feel it shouldn't be, please contact us directly. The best way is to send a short, polite note to support at river.com. If you cannot send such a message from an alternate not-spam domain and network, you can send to blackhole-rein~rim at river.com, and the message will end up in the right place (if you can read this web page, you can probably send to that address). Otherwise, you can use our problem report form.

If you are interested in how we do it:

We have an excerpt from our configuration showing how we provide user-selectable block lists. While some of the details of our specific implementation have changed since that page was created, the techniques remain the same.

List Specifics

Each level of blocking below includes the lists in the previous levels.

Minimal Blocks

Users protected by our minimal blocks are using the following shared dnsbls:

Light Blocks

Users protected by our light blocks add the following shared dnsbls:

along with our local domain and network block lists.

Regular Blocks

Users protected by our regular blocks add the following shared dnsbls:

along with our local free provider block list.

In addition, they refuse mail from hosts that provide impossible names at the start of mail transactions (syntactically incorrect HELO names).

Strong Blocks

Users protected by our strong blocks add the following shared dnsbls:

In addition, they refuse mail from hosts that provide improper names at the start of mail transactions (unresolveable or non-FQDN HELO names), or that lack proper double-reverse DNS resolution on their sending IP address.

BOFH Blocks

Users protected by our BOFH blocks add the following shared dnsbls:

No False Negatives Blocks

Users protected by our No False Negatives blocks refuse all mail. They thus receive no spam.

In closing, let us just say that we are very sorry we must refuse mail from your open proxy, open relay, dynamic dialup, or spam origin & support domain or network. We look forward to a day when using such lists is unnecessary; when spammers are no more.

Thank you, and good luck with your future email endeavours.