Status of ubl.unsubscore.com: OFFLINE

LashBack's unsubscribe blacklist ("UBL"), as described by its publisher "is a unique, real-time blacklist of IP addresses which have sent email to addresses harvested from suppression files." It's a neat idea, an interesting way to monitor unsusbcribe compliance. But it can be tricky when it comes to things like shared IP addresses, addresss leakage, subscription forgery or data breaches. As I haven't tested it in a while, I can't speak to its accuracy as far as a spam filtering tool. I did test it years ago but that data is so dusty as to not warrant digging it back up.

Anyway, the reason I mention this today is that I've seen a poster on the Mailop list indicate that the Lashback UBL DNSBL is currently unavailable. If you use this DNSBL (ubl.unsubscore.com) in any of your spam filtering tools, you'll want to remove it.

Status of dnsbl.inps.de: DEAD

Christian Jung launched the inps.de DNSBL way back on December 29th, 2007.

Christian described the listing criteria as follows: "Every day thousands of spam e-mails arrive on our e-mail servers, which have to be processed by our anti-spam system. If an email is recognized as spam, the IP address of the sender is recorded in a blacklist for a certain period of time in order to enable faster email processing and reduce the system load."

Today, May 25, 2020, he has announced that it is shutting down, due to concerns around GDPR and personal challenges brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

He appears to be shutting it down in a graceful manner -- not "listing the world" as so many lists do as they wind down. This is good to see.

Note that in addition to the DNSBL dnsbl.inps.de, this also affects the DNSWL (whitelist) found at dnswl.inps.de. Both are ceasing.

If you use either the whitelist or blocklist in your email server config, you'll want to disable those checks as soon as possible.