RBL Monitoring

What better way to top off our email monitoring enhancements than with a new check type! We’re happy to introduce our RBL check.

RBL, or DNSBL, stands for “Real-time Black List,” and is used to publish the addresses of computers or networks linked to spamming, malware, or other abuses which system administrators may want to block from accessing their networks.

There are hundreds of RBLs in existence, which use a wide array of criteria for listing and delisting of addresses. These may include listing the addresses of zombie computers or other machines being used to send spam, listing the addresses of ISPs who willingly host spammers, or listing addresses which have sent spam to a honeypot system.

If the IP addresses of your servers appear on these RBLs, there’s a good chance you’ll have difficulty interacting with networks that subscribe to these RBLs. For instance, if your SMTP server is listed, you’ll likely be unable to send email to the systems that use the RBL you are listed on.

You can use our new RBL check to ensure that your servers aren’t listed and to receive notifications if they do get listed, allowing you to quickly take steps to remove your addresses from those RBLs. You can find more details about which RBLs we check and how to set them up in our RBL Check documentation.

Adding RBL checking to our already robust email monitoring checks for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 will help you sleep at night knowing that email is flowing as it should be.

RBL monitoring checks are available to all NodePing accounts. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up for your free 15-day trial of our server monitoring service.