Two Excellent Blacklist Lookup Tools

Here are two excellent online tools for looking up a client’s IP to see whether they have been blacklisted when troubleshooting e-mail flow.

For a complete RBL rundown, this is the one:

• MultiRBL: The complete IP check for sending Mailservers.

Our results from this one:

The APEWS listing is for our ISP. The others are not relevant.

And, one that can be used from the sending mail server itself:

• Multi-RBL Lookup Tool

Note that this second link has a self-issued certificate so a certificate warning will greet you.

The IP address of the Internet gateway will be automatically present in the Multi-RBL Lookup Tool.

Our results from the second tool:

In our case we use ExchangeDefender both for our incoming e-mail and as our SmartHost. So, we do not need to worry too much about being blacklisted because of our ISP or the IP address we have here locally.

The other listings were due to the fact that we have SMTP traffic restricted to ExchangeDefender server IPs only.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

SBS 2008 - WSUS Synchronizations and Exchange

Have a look at this:

Exchange BL and Spam Updates

The list of updates released in one day makes it pretty clear that our WSUS synchronization schedule needs to be set to more than once a day.

By default, we are setting all of our WSUS setups to sync 8 times a day or once every three hours.

That should be enough to catch most everything!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.