Why does DreamHost keep getting blacklisted?

So it seems DreamHost is once again blacklisted by SpamCop. (An email I sent today bounced back to me for this reason.) And not only was this problem confirmed by the DreamHost support page, but apparently AOL, Comcast, and GoDaddy have also blacklisted DreamHost. So what's the deal? Why is DreamHost on everyone's blacklist? Is there a spammer with a DreamHost account? I don't get it...

The DreamHost status page gives a bit of detail about it.
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/

--
Norm
Opinions are my own views and are not the views of DreamHost.
Any advice offered by me should be acted upon only at your own risk.

>Is there a spammer with a DreamHost account?

It's probably a lot more than one. Dreamhost is doing a lot to try and stop spam origionating from their servers. But with so many customers, and spam restrictions are getting tougher. AOL is particularly difficult, with customers (and AOL cusotmers at that!) are the ones setting hte black list escentially. When an un-known number of people mark something as spam, the sending IP gets blocked. There's also flood limits imposed by AOL and the like so if to many dremhost customers send legimate E-mail to AOL we may get blocked.



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

There's really nothing to "get"... this is typical for an ISP/Hosting provider.

Think of how many domains there are in the world that aren't blacklisting us. The occasional shank from companies who have automated their blacklisting is expected.

I appreciate Dreamhost publishing this information so we can answer our own questions before we flood the support desk with duplicate noise. And I also appreciate that they make these listings a priority to get fixed.

AOL is the most notorious, and they have pretty evil restrictions. However, they are also good to work with and after a few tries usually get it worked out.

Hang in there man, DH has your back... because they already have your dollar :)

"There's really nothing to "get"... this is typical for an ISP/Hosting provider."

No, it's not. I've been using shared hosting for nearly 10 years with about a half-dozen different companies, and this is the first time my emails have ever been blacklisted.

There are two main blocks that DreamHost has been affected by Volume of Mail and Spam complaints. Depending on the size of provider a block may have anywhere from very little effect to OMGZ. In many cases the blocks are automated as Messages/time/IP and spam complaints/time/IP.

If someone blocks us for volume we open lines of communication with them and try to get whitelisted.

The problem with the spam complaints is that in many cases they aren't complaints/volume/IP they are just complaints/IP so we may get blocked even with a low percentage of spam just due to the volume.

We have been dedicating alot of resources to dealing with this. We'll keep you up to date as we tackle the problem. There are a great number of email providers and shared blocklists so it is a huge ongoing task as you can imagine.