What is dnswl.org?
DNSWL.org provides a Whitelist of known legitimate email servers to reduce the chances of false positives while spam filtering. We effectively divide the entire Internet up (by IP) into five categories, and provide you with efficient access methods to this data for free.
| Trust Level | Description |
|---|---|
| High | Never sends spam. |
| Medium | Extremely rare spam occurrences, corrected promptly. |
| Low | Occasional spam occurrences, actively corrected but less
promptly. This is the default for most categories. |
| None | Legitimate mail server, may also send spam. This is the default for some categories (eg Email Marketing Provider). |
If you know of IP addresses which we have miscategorized or which we missed, please tell us. Your input is our motivation for maintaining this service.
What does it cost?
There is no business model associated with dnswl.org. It is believed that this service can be maintained by volunteers. We believe that it is easier and more effective to cooperatively maintain a single whitelist than for each of us to manually maintain our own separately.
Spam from a dnswl.org-listed IP?
If you detect spam coming from a dnswl.org-listed IP, you should first use the regular abuse contact (eg the ISP or other organisation responsible for the spam or spam-related resources like spamvertized websites etc). If no action is taken by the responsible (or no action is to be expected), please let us know. It is also OK to Cc: us on your complaints to the ISP. However we do generally not have direct influence over the (in-)action of an ISP.
Of course, inaction will lead to a response from our side, eg lowering the score or disabling entries, either for particular IPs or for a complete record.
Please use admins@dnswl.org for such correspondence, or use the feedback form and select "change". It is very helpful if you can include the affected DNSWL Id.
Recommended Usage
Of course you may use this data to filter however you like. Our general recommendations are:
| Skip greylisting for all listed IPs (none - high) | All listed hosts are expected to pass greylisting so you are only avoiding delays, not affecting what gets blocked. |
| Skip blacklisting for all listed IPs (none - high) | All listed hosts are known to send legitimate email and should not be blacklisted. |
| Skip spam filtering for medium and high ranked IPs. | These are trusted to send spam rarely enough that they are not worth filtering. |
| Never skip virus filtering. | |
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admins@dnswl.org
Please write in english, german or french - answers will be in english or german
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