It seems that many of RZ's servers have been banned / blacklisted by major ISPs / mail providers such as Comcast, Hotmail etc. So users of sites (share)hosted by RZ cannot send messages to these addresses!

If this was not a reason to drop RZ as a hosting provider, I would not imagine what else would...

Did you contact RZ to get help?
All ISPs provide instruction/procedure to remove ip from blacklist.

I also have a reseller program through RZ. One of my clients has a far-flung organization and needs to keep in touch internationally. I have them on my RZ account.

RZ was fantastic, up until the last 6 - 9 months. Increasingly the server I'm on (Anderson) keeps getting blacklisted. I've tried contacting them, but while they eventually get around to most of my notifications, I've had to take several in-hand myself.

When I complained, they offered me a one-time move at no charge, but if I complain again, they wash their hands of me.

I am seriously considering moving my clients to my other reseller account at HawkHost and cancelling my RZ account.

RZ *was* very good for a long time - I think I've been with them for like 3 years. Oh well. . .

I've tolerated temporary downtimes over the years, especially early morning when it seemed the server was mass emailing.

Now, the server seems to have a lot less of a load, but I have a support ticket in and it's going past 36 hours for what should be a relatively easy fix.

Prices on the package went up, but Support seems to have gone way down.

At least people leaving seems to have reduced my servers load lol.

I am looking, they seem to have lost their edge.

Did you contact RZ to get help?
All ISPs provide instruction/procedure to remove ip from blacklist.From what I hear, it's not that simple, especially when dealing with Hotmail, Yahoo etc. The procedure is one thing, the providers' reaction is another. Quite a few hosts are driven crazy by the whole blacklisting thing.

From what I hear, it's not that simple, especially when dealing with Hotmail, Yahoo etc. The procedure is one thing, the providers' reaction is another. Quite a few hosts are driven crazy by the whole blacklisting thing.
Hotmail/Microsoft is responsive and quite helpful when dealing with black list issue.
I think ips are removed from black list automatically after a period of time, of course only if you're not the real spammer.
Yahoo do not usually block ip but they implement a defer scheme.

The actual blacklisting is a problem. Bigger problem is the time taken by them to react to remedy the situation. Even though there are repeated problems there is nobody from their side checking the IPs in the blacklist. If we don't report blacklisting, probably they will never know about it!

From what I hear, it's not that simple, especially when dealing with Hotmail, Yahoo etc. The procedure is one thing, the providers' reaction is another. Quite a few hosts are driven crazy by the whole blacklisting thing.

Dan, you are exactly correct - many ISP's have their own schema to handle blacklists and it has nothing to do with sending spam...

Hotmail/Microsoft is responsive and quite helpful when dealing with black list issue.
I think ips are removed from black list automatically after a period of time, of course only if you're not the real spammer.
Yahoo do not usually block ip but they implement a defer scheme.

honestly, you are just not hosting enough clients...

all of these ISP's do not work off of any established RBL system. They each have their own rules and they are based on user feedback. There is a vicious cycle going on here. End users report legitimate mail as spam (either by accident or because they do not want to opt out, etc). ISP's then blacklist or reroute mail to spam bins based on either total volume of mail from an IP and/or percentage of user generated spam complaints. The shear fact that 99% of the mail users report as spam isnt anything close to spam, well, thats another issue altogether. We participate in white list programs and feedback loops for all of the major ISP's that have such programs setup. If I showed you the mail that AOL users or Comcast users in particular report as spam, you would laugh. I would say 80% of the AOL/Comcast reported spam messages are a customer making an inquiry to a company, then reporting their response as spam (apparently the delete icon and the spam icon are too close together or look similar enough to confuse people - heck, I have heard users say they didnt even know what the difference was and they figured clicking spam would move it to the spam bin and not delete it so they could look at it later). Hotmail is even worse - they do not even have a formal feedback system setup - but, at least they rarely blacklist and instead route mail to spam boxes instead of inboxes - but, their system is based on a bogus reporting scheme - and again, it is end user driven - so, to suggest dealing with ISP's is easy, etc - simply isnt correct - we spend 100's of hours maintaining compliance to keep the mail flowing to these ISP's - The ISP's are handling this all wrong and its shared providers paying the price...

It seems that many of RZ's servers have been banned / blacklisted by major ISPs / mail providers such as Comcast, Hotmail etc. So users of sites (share)hosted by RZ cannot send messages to these addresses!

If this was not a reason to drop RZ as a hosting provider, I would not imagine what else would...

Are you sending out any mailing lists? especially mid sized ones? if you are, chance are you are part of the problem. Users, even if legitimately subscribed to lists, will report them as spam rather then unsubscribe - it is almost at a state where you simply cannot host mailing lists with shared hosting providers. If you want to run mailing lists, you should look at 3rd party services or get your own dedicated server with your own mail server IP. This way, if the ISP blocks you, you can take it up with them. Show them your legitimate opt in mailing list and petition them to change their systems. You can also get end users who are affected to call their ISP's and complain - that is the only way it is going to change.

If you do not run a mailing list, I apologize - you are paying the price for users running a mailing list in a shared environment and for ISP's backwards handling of spam and RBL - I mean seriously - who can leave this sort of thing solely in the hands of end users...

Andrew is exactly right on this, and for such reasons as he's given many providers have had to really lock down the mailing lists even if 100% legit lists. :(

I have had this issue with RZ a few times and while I don't think a perfect spam/blacklisg solution will ever exist I can share a few comments about how RZ deals with this.

- RZ's SLA (like many) say nothing about email.

- It is a reactive process and RZ only finds out about the blocks when tickets start pooring in.

- Support will give very little info if any about the reason.

- Some of RZ's shared servers have an ongoing problem with being relisted every few days. This has not happend on my RZ server... whew :)

Never ceases to amaze me when a server is blacklisted unjustly by some crap free email service or crap ISP, its the sending hosts fault. But if a single email is ever blocked by the host unjustly, it's also the hosts fault.

Email is a war zone, has been for years, and Hotmail falsley blocking legitimate mail servers is Hotmail's fault.

The real problem with spam is that the people who receive them click on the links. They should not.

If nobody was clicking on these links, spammers would stop spamming but there is always someone who want a bigger penis or some viagra pills and who is gonna click on it. Lol.

Also with all these spam filters that are now installed on every server, I am wondering who is still receiving spam anyway. Personnaly I don't anymore.

Why do we still have some spammers ?