Technically legal extortion rackets.

Ok, woke up this morning to this and we're feeling outraged. This seems like a protection racket to web hosting providers.

Background:
Websites we're hosting on a particular server has a set IP address. When email gets sent out or received, there are blacklists that can be doublechecked to make sure that particular IP address isn't a known spammer. The more blacklists your IP address appears on, the more likely your email will go to spam. For the record, we don't appear on any. Until now.

Lately, one of our clients has been complaining some of their emails have been going to spam by default. We just checked, and out of 86 known blacklists, we're now appearing on 2, actually one because they're obviously the same company, UCEPROTECTL2 and UCEPROTECTL3.

Must be a mistake. None of our clients are spammers. Normally, we go to the blacklist company and file a complaint, and they take us off. No harm done. But this time, this blacklist company is saying they know our IP address is not bad, but they're instead listing all IP addresses from our ISP anyway due to our "bad neighborhood". Again, there are 86 blacklists, and this is the first "mainstream" one doing this.

Actually, wait, there's a whitelist option at the bottom. Ok, that's better. Let's see.

*sigh*. They'll add us to the whitelist for $27/month. Why? How is that not extortion? If you check, uceprotect.net and whitelisted.org both have the same logo, so obviously the same company.

Also note the incorrect spelling and grammar. Not a lot, but enough to raise red flags.

I didn't realize such a thing existed and it could affect us. Hopefully spam filters will learn to ignore this blacklist.