As you may have noticed, the sites have been down for over a day. This is due to a combination of Spamhaus and our ISP Aplus.net. As discovered on Saturday, Spamhaus incorrectly blacklisted our server as being used for spam and belonging to a company that we have no association with. This has prevented a lot of our legitimate email reaching its destination because if a server checks with Spamhaus it will reject our email. We do not spam. Ever. We have a secure server that has not been compromised. We follow a lot of internet standards, such as having SPF records and abuse email addresses (we have not received one email alleging abuse). We run independent secuity scans and open relay tests on our server. We take our responsibility seriously. However companies are getting more and more rabid in their attempts to stop spam. The likes of AOL routline block servers and emails. AOL will reject emails, for example, that contain certain URLs (one that crops up a lot is an image hosting service which AOL has deemed to be bad). It is going from spam deterrent to active censorship. So because Spamhaus listed us, Aplus.net shut down our server with no warning whatsoever. We contacted them and they said they'd get someone to look into it. It was only later in the day that we extracted the information that they'd shut us down. Furthermore there was no one there to solve the problem. But we're back online today while Aplus investigates. This is worrying, that our own ISP doesn't exactly trust us. Then we have Spamhaus who are judge and jury and will not accept any dissent from those whom livelyhoods they are destroying. Then we have the likes of Aplus who shut us down with zero investigation, so what does one do? As much of our email is not getting through, I have (I think ) disabled outgoing email from our messageboards. This is in addition to suspending registrations. Aside from a lot of email not reaching its destination, it also allows me to show a clearer picture of what email the server is sending. If someone needs to look at our maillogs, they'll see we're not spamming and are in fact sending very little email. We may have to move IP address if Aplus are amenable, so that we are no longer blacklisted by Spamhaus. More news when we know it.
Update: we have been removed from Spamhaus's blacklist, and Aplus has shut down the correct website this time. Full email access should be restored.