: Where do various RBLs like Spamhaus or SORBS collect data from? We send legitimate e-mails to our opted-in customers in bulk. Recently we started having issues with our IP reputation, which we

@Berumen354

There are a variety of data sources used by RBLS's to identify potential spam sources...

Honeypots - In these instances fake email addresses are created and posted in order to receive spam emails. When spam emails are received then the sender is added to blacklists.

Spam Filters - Many spam filters provide regular feeds to blacklist providers based on automated spam detection algorithms. When a spam email is detected by the spam filter not only is it flagged as spam in the email client but the details of the email sender and email server are also sent through to various blacklists.

Manual Reports - Many manual spam report buttons result in spam reports being sent through to blacklist service providers as well as flagging the email as spam. This works very much like the spam filters process but rather than the spam being flagged automatically a user has seen the email and has manually flagged it as spam using the "this is spam" button.

Reputable Email Providers - Many free and commercial email providers such as Live Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc, have their own in house spam filters and feed spam data through to blacklists.

There are a large number of other methods that blacklist service providers have for detecting spam on the internet and these methods are often in house proprietary methods which do not get released. The reason why it is so hard to find out how emails are detected as spam and reported is that providing that sort of information would make it easier for spammers to implement blackhat techniques to bypass and avoid detection and reporting on blacklists.

As for what the SORBS feeder servers are basically "feeder server" is a generic term used to describe the source servers of data which are often either a receiving email server or a spam filtering services main database.

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