The Spamhaus Project Reviews 120

This Company does not sufficiently investigate what they block. Everything seems to be controlled by poorly designed algoritms

After years of using the same reporting system to send out our customer reports, Spamhaus decided to mark our own email that sends these reports as spam. What the? No ability to contact them. Now I read they don't even reply to tickets. What the hell, the company exists to protect us from spam not mark us as such for providing the same reports we always have to our customers. Fix it, fix it, fix it.

they are overzealous, and would better serve the community by providing an API to users with certificates for verification.

spamhaus is working against the distributed internet by flagging non-"sanctioned" IP addresses (from the big players) as "spam".

This company exists under the pretence that they are there to protect from spam, but who are they protecting exactly?

Definitely NOT individual users.

And I don't care about the corporations who pay for this garbage service, but I have to wonder if they realise Spamhaus is screwing them over too, by rendering their customer service ineffective, and actively losing them customers.

This trash fire has blocked me MID CONVERSATION with different customer services (while discussing a problem I had or a repair I had pending) SEVERAL TIMES, as well as blocking me from even initiating perfectly innocent enquiries to companies (like asking for information about a product). Unless I'm mid conversation or my question is really important, I will add whichever company I can't access to my own blacklist because I have better things to do with my time than beg a company, and their crappy gatekeeping service, for their attention and permission. But sometimes there is no choice, and I MUST get the block removed.

They claim I need to contact my ISP to get unblocked, but I'm 99% sure I got blocked in the first place for using a VPN (a perfectly legitimate tool people shouldn't be punished for using by greedy scummy companies) so my ISP has NOTHING to do with it (you wouldn't need them even if you don't use a VPN - you just reset your router to get a new IP, however that isn't enough with these a-holes, because they blacklist your email address too, NOT just the IP, as they claim), and nor do my emailing habits (I have NEVER emailed more than one recipient at a time, so WHERE IS THE SPAM???), so instead I have to beg them on the contact form to whitelist me every other week, which is RIDICULOUS and UNACCEPTABLE.

This service provides NOTHING to NO-ONE other than money in to whoever came up with this scam's pocket. Oh, and our data for them to sell for even more profit, of course.

This crap - interfering with a person's ability to communicate - should be ILLEGAL, not touted as some "security feature".

Absolutely unbelievable. They blocked my emals for absolutely no reason whatsoever and trying to unblock them is a nightmare unless you are computer savvy....which I most certainly am not. Trying to communicate and reason with them is impossible. If companies are allowed make business altering decisions with no warning and no consultation for no reason they should make it very easy to have the block lifted. It is not.
Would give no stars if I could. Hate them and everybody who is associated with them.

Completely destroyed our business. This organization rightly protects emails from compromised websites (which is becoming very common), but they will never drop the ban after addressing the issue and securing your website. It's been many months since and we're still listed... Like other users have mentioned, they are in control of most of the world's emails, yet they're the tiniest organization of just a few people; you can never talk to them, despite allowing you to write your own message/appeal, so don't bother wasting your time.

We're going to have to rebrand our site to a new domain, with 100,000+ users.

Company was dissolved in the UK in 2020 with the founder now 'hiding' behind an Andorra address.

Unreasonable service with tons of false positive blocking completely legitimate email servers. Avoid at all cost!

We have in the last couple of weeks set up a new email address for a new employee. Then we receive the blocked message from this company. At first I thought it was spam itself only to check the company out. How can they do this? Luckily our email hosting company can sort this out.

I was approached by a client who was somehow talked into buying a fake service of Spamhaus to remove his ip address from a blacklist.

This is a scam and my friend never was on any blacklist, Spamhaus just shows every IP you enter in the box as blacklisted.

If you have any doubts if you IP has been blacklisted use whatismyip blacklist-check for a correct diagnostic and free.

If your IP was blacklisted, there are cheaper ways to fix this and some are free:

Many ISP's designate a static IP address, usually those addresses almost never change for a client except that most Docsis modems and probably others if you leave them "disconnected" for several hours or a day they will lose the assigned IP address and will get assigned another one.

If you run a business and are managing multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts this WILL put you on a blacklist because they detect this as spam.
If you run a legitimate business then you should connect to these services using a known VPN service.
Because VPN services line NordVPN, ExpressVPN etc... have contracts with social networks and other services that allows them to be whitelisted and every IP address coming from their servers will be on a whitelist.

Don't fall for the Spamhaus scam.

I switched my ISP from Cox to Centurylink and sent out an email to 80 of my friends and colleagues, announcing a change to my email address. I was blacklisted by Spamhaus. I tried to remove the address twice with no results. Spamhaus's disclaimer is another version of Pontius Pilot's declaration that it doesn't interfere with the actions of its customers. The upshot is that I am unable to email one of my clients, Texas Tech University. Spamhaus declares that the failure of my emails to reach TTU is TTU's responsibility. Good luck with that defense when the end of the world occurs.

Rubbish, I have a new blogging site that they simply just add to spam for no good reason. Now I have to go through the whole process of removing it from their database.

I am a domainer buying/selling domains
Registered a domain on 5th April 2020
No website, no email, associated with the domain, just a placeholder page.
On 9th came to know it is listed in DBL
The removal page page does not accept free emails.
Created an email on the domain and sent request.
No reply or link came them.
What kind of joke is this?

Spamhaus sometimes blacklists a range of IP addresses making innocent IP addresses victims of spammers and the incompetence of Spamhaus.

No blacklist is perfect, so Spamhaus's false positive errors are not a big problem per se. The worst part of Spamhaus is its slow response or no response to requests of unlisting innocent IPs. It may take days to take an innocent IP off their blacklists, affecting business severely.

Many services respond to requests for removing innocent IPs from blacklists in minutes.

Spamhaus is not a good choice for spam blacklists.

I'm just a private individual, and I can't keep my ISP delisted! They keep blocking me, and at least once the referenced ISP wasn't mine. They've been plaguing me all day, even though I have gone through all their steps. This is about the sixth episode, and the frequency seems to be increasing. Nor did they respond to my email asking for help. Where do we report these guys?

It was a sad moment today when I realized that this still exists.

Maybe this service can stop 60-90% of spam. But I would rather have an inbox with more spam than being a slave of this US foundation scam. Hopefully mother Russia helps to solve this fraud. Amen!

My suggestion is to not contact them in case of listing. Bad service.

Spamhaus is total garbage. They are not able to answer without using copy-pasted mails. And if you reply, you get no answer at all.

And what they will tell you is to build a good reputation for your domain. And normally your domain is already suspended. Spamhaus forces the providers to do so.

By the way, you can NOT even use freemail providers to contact them. Their recommendation is to use the domain's mailboxes to get in touch with them. But at the same time they are messaging all providers about incoming abuses and forcing them to suspend the domains. That way you can NOT use your domain for mails. Does this make sense? Not at all.

Way to bypass the freemail thing? Just search a small freemail provider that they don't have on their 'blacklist'.

And their site and services do not comply with the GDRP from 25/05/2018. How can this site even exist? Anyone should sue this service that is actually destroying some small- & mid-sized businesses.

Should be investigated for corruption. We bought 2 brand new domains, checked with Securi and not listed in Spamhaus. Launched the websites and without sending a single email, both domains got listed into the Spamhaus database. All we did was make a Tweet! This is corruption beyond belief! Spamhaus are protecting the big boys such as Facebook and Twitter and destroying the small starter business. Please someone investigate them or shut them down!