[Bill]

Interesting. I'll pass this to Chris, just because he is the Admin and knows a lot more about I.T. than I do.

There are hundreds of sites out there that generate "blacklists". Some are thorough, reputable, and well-maintained. Others, not so much - they are cobbled together simply so the owners can sell the list. The reason that a site is put on a blacklist is never clear, and once on a list, it is a hassle to get off. Many ISPs, especially the major ones, regularly check a set of well-maintained and reputable blacklist organizations, and that is right and proper. After all, it is in their interest to keep their subscribers happy, and spam and malware make for unhappy customers.

One of the best and most commonly used blacklist sites is Spamhaus.org. TMO is not on their list. And if you go to blacklistalert.org, you will see a list of about 55 of the top blacklists. TMO is not on any of them.

What you are seeing, I think, is that way down in the dregs of the blacklist community somewhere, TMO got a mention. I have no idea how, but my guess is that it is not because of anything we, the members, post. I should point out that whenever a member posts a link, I check it immediately for safety. It is one of the many parts of being a moderator that users don't see.

You may remember that a year or two ago, the board went through an intense period of spammer signups, mostly from Russia and China. Chris and I went through agonies, and finally pulled out some big guns and stopped it. My guess is that before we got the fence set up, one of the spammer links lit up an alert somewhere, and TMO was placed on a list. Which one? Don't know.

I will also mention that whenever anyone posts spam on TMO, he is not only banned from the board, but his information is automatically reported to various anti-spammer organizations, and eventually ends up on a blacklist. That is a real good threat for casual spammers - they go away in a hurry when they find this out.

Lucas, I will presume that you work for the Navy in Indianapolis. I worked for a similar organization for almost 30 years (and spent quite a bit of time at the Indianapolis facility as part of it). About half of our computers were on an internal network that had no physical connection to the outside world. In other words, it was not possible to go to the Internet, or send email outside the organization. The other half did have a connection method to the world, but because of all the sensitive information floating around, the checks and cross-checks and controls and blockades were exhaustive to the point of paranoia. That makes sense - you can't take exception to that. In your case, I'm guessing that you have run into one of these, as referenced by the fact that "YOUR corporate access policies" are mentioned. In other words, your organization is dipping deeper into the blacklist bucket than the big ISPs, such as Cox, Roadrunner, gmail, and so forth, do. Nothing wrong with that - a good corporate policy is crucial, and overkill is better than vulnerability. If you can identify the particular blacklist that is raising the alarm (ask your sys admin), we can go through the hoops to get off the list. Without knowing that, though, I'm not sure how to proceed. Perhaps Chris does.

Hope this helps - and reassures you that TMO is a safe site.

Bill