How to Get Removed from Blacklists?

There are tens and hundreds of blacklists that help to fight spam. Using one or more blacklists for filtering incoming emails can eliminate up to 99 % of spam. However, no blacklisting system is perfect and hence from time to time it might happen that a good address is blacklisted too. And there are more scenarios in which it makes sense to allow blacklisted addresses to be removed from the list. For example, a server hosting company might have a poor client who sends spam and recognizes that using a blacklist monitoring service. The hosting closes the client’s account. What is left is an IP address that belongs to the hosting company and it is blacklisted. This is when blacklist removal needs to be done, so that the IP can be cleaned and assigned to a new client.

General Instructions

If your IP address is blacklisted on one or more blacklists, you should note that blacklists are managed by different owners. There is no central entity that you can contact and ask for removal from all blacklists. We at Online Domain Tools do not maintain any of the blacklists and it is thus pointless to contact us with removal requests. Here is how to proceed when you are blacklisted and want to be removed, assuming you are listed on a blacklist named xyz.domain.com:

• Many DNS-based blacklists not only provide information that a certain address is listed (via a valid A DNS record), but they also provide additional details in a TXT DNS record. Good blacklist checkers provide this information to the end user. This is the primary source of links where the user can get more information about the listing and instructions on how to ask for removal. Not all blacklists work like this, however. Some blacklists do provide additional information, but they do not provide any link. And there are also blacklists that do not provide TXT records at all.
• If there was no additional information provided by the blacklist itself, you can try to search for this info using your favorite search engine. Search for xyz.domain.com in the search engine. If there are no relevant results, search for domain.com blacklist, domain.com dnsbl, or domain.com rbl. If nothing helped, try to directly access http://xyz.domain.com/ and http://domain.com/ to see if there is a web page. For most of the blacklists, this should be enough to locate a web page with instructions on how to get removed.
• If still nothing helped, you are listed on one of the blacklists that does not have a web page. Try to use Whois and enter domain.com to get contact information to the owner of the domain. Try to contact them and ask for removal.

Note that some lists operates fully automatically and do not accept removal requests. In case of these blacklists, the listed IP address will be removed automatically, once a certain period of time elapses. Obviously, this requires that the IP address no longer expresses the behavior because of which it became listed in the first place.

List of Removal Links for Active Blacklists

We have done the work for you for most of the active DNSBL and RBL blacklists out there. Here are their information and removal links: