There are a lot of real time backlists available for mail administrators and ISPs to use. These blacklists may vary in their criteria of blacklisting an IP or a domain, or in their whitelisting process but all exist to fight spammers and stop spam.
An Open Relay Blacklists prevent messages from servers who have been identified as open relay. Messages from an open relay sever are likely to be spam since this type of server allows non authenticated source to relay emails to any address in the internet.
Whenever you got caught in this type of blacklist, you have to resubmit your IP to their checking queue. http://ordb.org/submit/. Usually it takes 72 hours before your request is processed.
Another real time blacklist is the SpamCop Blacklist(SCBL); SpamCop allows recipients of unsolicited commercial email (commonly known as spam) to report the offense to the ISP or web host of the spam-sending address. These reports are then compiled by the SpamCop generating the SCBL. Other legitimate senders land in the SCBL for several reasons. First and foremost is the fact that their IP is shared by other users of their ISP. Furthermore, these legitimate senders can also be included in the SCBL as a result of careless or over zealous reporting of spam.
If you are included in the SCBL accidentally, you can report your complain to mailto:blproblem@admin.spamcop.net. But if you have sent a spam in the past, you will get delisted automatically within 48 hours from the last spam report.
Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) is another type of public blacklist. SPEWS doesn’t rely on reports unlike SCBL, once you landed on the SPEWS list, there is little an end user can do. SPEWS doesn’t rely on requests for delisting either. You have to stop sending spam, or stop your involvement on spammers (hosting spammers or selling spamware) for SPEWS to remove you from their list. In addition SPEWS makes use of honeypots. These honeypots are servers/addresses that have not received any legitimate emails since they are dummy addresses – addresses that have not sent an email.
Other blacklists are Spam and Open Relay Blocking System, Vipul’s Razor, Pyzor, Spamhaus, MAPS, SpamFire, etc. If you would like to know whether you are in the real time blacklists used by major ISPs, you can try emailreach services.
