Is there a good API for blacklisted domains?

Question

hi all, just curious if there was a good service paid or unpaid where I can send in either a user's email address or the domain from their email address and get back if they're a known spammer or not?

thanks

Answer 1

From some Google'ing I came across this:

http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/

Looks pretty good.

Answer 2

Spammers usually forge their email address (sometimes using the email addresses of legitimate users like yourself). They don't need to know your password, they just pretend like they're sending it on your behalf. The same thing applies to domains. Using either one for detecing spam is likely to be inaccurate.

The email headers (your email software should provide some way to see it) should actually provide IP information about where the email originated from. The IP address is one of the few ways to check for spam. First you can check it using something like MX Toolbox to check several blacklists, (including spamhaus)

Other methods for identifying spam include DKIM and SPF. Usually your email provider should automatically check these and rate the spam if they fail either SKIM or SPF.

Answer 3

As Chuck said it will not be a useful method to prevent e-mail spams. There are some other techniques looking the content and discretes if an e-mail is a spam or not using tokenizer methods. i suggest you to glance at SpamBayes

Answer 4

The is an API available at www.atlbl.com that you can query on email address, URL, or domain name, and get a listing status or reputation score.