Reg Whelan's Information

Please read the previous article, "Guilty (by omission) as charged..Be Warned", before continuing to read this one.

As you might well imagine, after experiencing what I had been through for months, I wasn't very pleased with everything that had happened. I wasn't very happy with my hosting service provider. And after being told that they had no idea why my site should have been visible on the web at all, I was left very disillusioned.

Not possessing knowledge about what had transpired or how to overcome and eliminate the cause of the problem I was forced to grin and bear it.

It is now well over 12 months since all this happened. I changed hosting service provider shortly after (about 12 months ago) .

I have a number of other websites hosted and I had them moved to the new service as well.

Some months later It dawned on me to check the other domains for emails sent to the domains instead of being sent to my gmail account.

I was rather taken aback to find that one domain was holding in the range of 700,000 bounced spam email that appeared to have been sent by a non existent user's email address at that domain.

Since I was not sending emails from the domain name I was blissfully unaware that that my domain had been blacklisted.

I undertook the necessary steps to have the domain cleared from the blacklisting.

Finally! The penny dropped.

The IP address for all my web sites had been the same.

Ok so what happened?

Some benevolent spammer forged an email sender identity as the non existent user at my domain.

Obviously many complaints were made about the spam emails. It would appear that as a result of those complaints my IP address was blocked by servers all round the world.

That meant that when visitors attempted to view my sites the data was found to be coming from a blacklisted IP and was filtered out by the visitor's Internet Service Providers.

Not funny!

Reg