Your insight has helped to put things in perspective and I admit I don't feel as bemused by the whole situation as I did.

Is SORBS considered by many to be a reputable source of data or is it simply one of the largest and most widely known? Is there an alternative that provides suitably adequate data to protect?

Also, you mention static IP addresses being more insecure but are they the only solution to blacklist problems or is there another workaround? And what kind of a security risk do they pose?

Regrettably, SORBS is one of the biggest headaches for end users on the planet. Based outside the UK, some organisations choose to implement SORBS as part of their firewall solution which is supposed to protect end users from SPAM sources. Unfortunately it is rarely the case that this self-important bunch of idiots ever gets anything achieved except to raise the anger of legitimate users across the world.

The other problem is that the ISPs that get affected seems to move with the tides and bears little semblence to reality. Those people you could e-mail yesterday suddenly become unavailable today. If you actually complain to SORBS, they blame the ISP, and so they can sit back with smug faces and do nothing. The company or organisation that has implemented SORBS as part of their firewall only become aware of the problems when faced with anger from outside clients who are tyring to contact their people.

SORBS should be removed from the face of the planet as far as I am concerned. Their data is questionable, their arrogance is legendry and their service is chronically bad, and to top it off, if you dare to criticise them, they ridicule people in public forums such as this.

SORBS alleges that many ISPs fail in what passes for their service criteria and the only advice is to boycott their service completely. BT is one of the biggest ISPs in the world and if they fail the SORBS test, it does seem to point to SORBS being arrogant and inaccurate, rather than a company the size of BT being the source for SPAM.

No-one should be forced to use static IP addresses - this makes everything even more insecure but SORBS is disinterested in anything other than their own warped agenda, safe in the knowledge that they are out of UK jurisdiction.

I recently discovered emails I was sending to companies using MailMarshal SPAM filtering software were not being delivered.

I received an error message of 550 Rule imposed mailbox access.

The reason for this was my IP address was on a SORBS email blacklist.

I was told by BT Business to contact their abuse team who were very helpful and told me they received calls like this on a frequent daily basis and had been for over a year.

They told me the reason for this is because the IP address is dynamic and it gets a bit technical from here.

The email settings for my outgoing mail server were mail.mydomain.co.uk which is a pretty standard way of setting up an email account but because my email is routed via a BT URL (hostXX-XXX-XX-XXX.rangeXX-XXX.btcentralplus.com, X = numbers in IP address), when the email is traced back it appears to have originated from BT and not from mydomain.co.uk. This I believe is something that can flag an IP as a potential source of SPAM.

I was offered three possible solutions.

1.Turn off my router for an hour and when I log back into the internet I will be assigned a new IP address. – I did this only to find the new IP was already in the SORBS blacklist! – Not a solution.

2.Change my outgoing mail server to smtp.btconnect.com – this stopped the Mail Delivery Failure messages but the mail was still not delivered, nor was it captured in a SPAM folder by the recipient. – Not a solution.

3.Have my connection assigned a ‘static’ IP address (XX.XX.XXX.XX). Additional cost £5pcm.

I do not yet have the static IP assigned but I have negotiated it into a change of service level and it is in the process of being set up so I am yet to see if this does provide a satisfactory solution. I have been assured by the BT Broadband technical support team that this should solve the problem.

However, all three of the people I spoke with on the technical support team had no familiarity with a 550 error message nor were they aware that their abuse team dealt with this very problem on a daily basis.

This problem is not isolated to BT.

A friend of mine using a different well known provider is not even able to view her own business website because her hosting company also blocks dynamic IP addresses that are in email blacklists.

Unfortunately for her, her provider does not even issue static IP addresses so her only alternative is to close the account and find someone that does.