We were dealing with UCEPROTECT blocks roughly one year ago where we had
several IP's blacklisted in level 1. Based on the info they gave, it
wasn't always that easy to pinpoint the cause of the block, since they
provided a date and time and wrote "+/- 1 minute". Several times, i
checked our logs for that time +/- 5-10 minutes, and that IP had sent 0
mails.
After a while, i started digging deeper into them as a blacklist...
First of all, a lot of posts i found while googling was referring to
them as scammers, extortion/blackmail blacklist, and so on.
As mentioned by Hans-Martin, you can pay them to be whitelisted, which
means that you will no longer appear in level 2 or 3 according to
http://www.whitelisted.org/. So if you have sent so much bad mail you
end up in their level 2 or 3, you can just pay them and then you can
keep sending all the spam you want without a care in the world.
You can also pay them for monitoring so you're alerted when something
happens to the IPs you're managing. Do note that they don't accept
Paypal any longer, due to: http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=12&s=0
News from 18.02.2019:
> Payment service provider Paypal really believe that they can treat
long-standing customers like shit and withhold their money for no
reason, but with all kinds of tricky excuses from their Terms and
Conditions for some days, weeks, or even months.
> In our opinion, they are clearly asking to boycott them.
> That's the reason why we do no longer accept Paypal, and why we
recommend, that every owner of a Paypal account, who does not want to
come into the same situation, should remove any money from their Paypal
account immediately, and to close the account, after the balance is Zero
and all money was removed successfully.
I guess people got tired of UCEPROTECT's blackmail scheme, and Paypal
decided to agree and withhold their money?
Also, looking at the bottom of their website, it shows that it is
copyrighted by http://www.uceprotect.org/
Looking at that website, aside from the obvious "WARNING: Do not play
around here. You have no idea who we really are, and what will happen to
you!", following the "For public amusement we have published stupidsters
sending cart00neys here"-link gave this nice explanation from them:
> People with a brain would simply fix their systems after getting
listed for abuse.
> Stupid losers are different.
> They wrongly believe that the Internet was made for spamming and
therfore they try to get listings removed by announcing legal action.
> Writing such cart00neys one becomes subject of public ridicule and
deserves to be banned from the Internet forever.
> We recommend to firewall those lamerz on sight.
So basically, you can pay to get whitelisted and send all the spam you
want. Why care about quality when you can get paid.
Getting delisted takes 7 days, or requires you to pay 89 CHF.
Additionally, their website sounds like it's been written by the usual
hacker style script-kiddie. In my opinion, it doesn't exactly provide
you with a sense of professionalism from their side.
It was honestly very hard to take them serious after all of that, and
i'd really wish people would stop using them, since it just seems like
some sort of cash-grab.
On 1/20/21 11:10 AM, Hans-Martin Mosner via mailop wrote:
Am 20.01.21 um 10:40 schrieb Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop:
Hello,
just got an information from MxToolbox that my IP (actually not my IP in
particular, but the ASN it belongs to) has been blacklisted at UCEPROTECT
level 3. Checking of my IP (217.182.79.147) at
http://www.uceprotect.net/en/rblcheck.php gives the info that it has been
listed because there were 1868 spamming IPs from within this ASN last 7
days while their threshold for level 3 listing is 717.
My question is: how widely is this BL (UCEPROTECT level 3) used? Do I have
to worry about deliverability? Their page tells me to ask my provider to fix
the issue, which I will do, but... it's OVH, so you know...
I also find it quite impudent that the people who run UCEPROTECT offer
the whitelisting option (ips.whitelisted.org), but request payment for it...
If you provide access to blacklist for free, you should whitelist for free
as well.
On one hand, UCEPROTECT is relatively aggressive, and their unlisting policy is
at least questionable. However, running
a blacklist incurs costs in terms of server time and admin time, so if they
provide access for free, how should they
recover their costs?
On the other hand - this is OVH! They are huge, and they don't seem to have a
working abuse desk (at least I never got
any reaction to abuse reports I sent there, and I've most likely send
hundreds). This means they are an attractive
spammer haven, and the number of persistent spammers in their network is
significant.
In light of this, UCEPROTECT taking whitelisting fees from users of cheap
providers that cut their costs by not paying
an abuse team or by making a profit from spammer hosting looks not so
unreasonable after all. I do not condone their
practice, though. On the mail systems that I run, mails from this AS would be
rejected with a temporary error code until
I see sufficient reason to whitelist the IP, which may take a day or more.
There's a saying in german "Billig muss man sich leisten können" - "You have to be
able to afford buying cheaply".
Cheers,
Hans-Martin
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Martin
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