Help - victim of keyword based blacklisting

[Rico68]

Hi,

I believe spamcop does only IP based blacklisting, but there must be other sites that do keyword based blacklisting - what are those?

My problem is that for years I have been using my realname pretty liberally in mailing lists. Unfortunately what I did not realise is that because my name is not a very common one it makes very good tokens for filtering.

A few spammers (lately 178.125.165.91) have used my email address as fake originating address. Obviously a few people have blacklisted this address - so far nothing unexpected.

The real bummer however - major email providers have blacklisted my realname, even when used with completely different email addresses. They can never have received spam from that email address so they must be filtering by the realname alone.

Since that is not only one email provider but apparently a whole bunch I am suspecting there must be somewhere databases of spam keywords however can not find them by any search.

Any idea?

[Wazoo]

The real bummer however - major email providers have blacklisted my realname, even when used with completely different email addresses. They can never have received spam from that email address so they must be filtering by the realname alone.

I'd like to see the 'evidence' of a "blacklisted my realname" rejection notification.

[Farelf]

I can see if your "realname" was (say) Rico Viagra or Richard Enhancement or somesuch that you might have a problem. Probably more with your addressees than with providers - though more of those are using/making available adaptive content filters these days and some of them do send rejection notices. Microsoft used to publish their key words and phrases list used for Outlook junkmail filtering but I guess that has gone by the board. Dumb idea to publish it anyway - that just gives spammers a free peek at what to avoid in their missives. Other lists are out there but they are limited. Surely you would know if your realname is the same as a "spam word"?

I'm missing something here maybe ...

[Rico68]

I'd like to see the 'evidence' of a "blacklisted my realname" rejection notification.

I never got a SMTP rejection notification so far, in most cases it lands in the recipients spam folders and in one particularly evil case - the email provider "seznam.cz" it goes to /dev/null without any warning or error. That one was adressed to a skilled computer expert who knows what a spam folder looks like.

Mails for hotmail contacts very often land in spam folders and usually these folks are a bit lost when I ask them to forward me the headers of the message or enquire why it has landed in the spam.

Most bizarre - 10 months ago I entered my name in a web contact form of TerraSip asking them for a favor. Although I have an account there I did not receive any answer for a long time - after 3 month came a very polite answer explaining that my mail (entered through the web form of said company from a logged in user!) landed in their spam folder. Am I getting paranoid?

No, the name has never been a spam-word in any language and completely dissimilar to common spam words. Unfortunately it is a 8 character pretty rare token, ideal for filtering.

[turetzsr]

I can see if your "realname" was (say) Rico Viagra or Richard Enhancement or somesuch that you might have a problem.

<snip>

...If I understand correctly, Rico68 is suggesting that someone may have published his e-mail address or a part of it in a keyword list that is being used to blacklist (right, Rico68?). I certainly have certain e-mail domains in my personal list, so I think his suggestion is certainly possible. I don't know how to find out what such public lists might be, though, so I am unable to help.

[Rico68]

...If I understand correctly, Rico68 is suggesting that someone may have published his e-mail address or a part of it in a keyword list that is being used to blacklist (right, Rico68?). I certainly have certain e-mail domains in my personal list, so I think his suggestion is certainly possible. I don't know how to find out what such public lists might be, though, so I am unable to help.

may suspicion is that it is even worse: along the email came always my real name and it appears to have ended up in the lists (or rather bayesian databases). Hence changing email address does not work unless I change my real name as well.

Fortunately I can abbreviate or misspell or slightly change my full name (the wonders of UTF-8 ) or maybe find other workarounds but I suspect that I am not alone and this kind of problem

[lisati]

As others have suggested, it is more common for blocking to be based on problems with the email address, email provider or message content.

It could be possible that there's a spam filter somewhere that needs fixing. I had to rethink one of the filters on my own privately run email server after realizing that although it picked up an objectionable phrase correctly, it wasn't written as well as it could be and was occasionally generating false positives.

Good luck!