"This IP address was found in SPEWS"

"This IP address was found in SPEWS," said a window that popped up when we tried to send a comment to our blogfriend Brian at A Map of the Cat.

Egad.  We've just been barred from commenting by something called the Spam Prevention Early Warning System. Clicking on "Click here to see the data/evidence file" took us to a data-saturated page entitled "customerblast/jhthosting/sex-rx/cjlinc."

Sex-rx?  Whassat? According to Wikipedia:

SPEWS is an anonymous service which maintains a list of IP address ranges belonging to Internet service providers which host spammers. [Who, Comcast.net? --ed] It is used by numerous Internet sites as a source of information about the senders of unsolicited bulk email, better known as spam.

SPEWS itself publishes a large text file containing its listings, and operates a database where users may query the reasons for a listing. Users of SPEWS can reprocess these data into formats usable by software for mail filtering.

There is a certain degree of controversy regarding SPEWS' anonymity and its methods.

Hey, you geeks out there.  Any suggestions on how to deal with this?

Update:  'Have had an online "Chat" session with Comcast.net's Dave, who advised us to send info to abuse@comcast.net, and they will contact the SPEWS people to remove our IP address from their list.  Sounds good.

Comments

[Brian]

Whoops, sorry Sissy. I had forgotten that I even had the particular Wordpress spam protection plugin that checks blocklists turned on.

It's disabled now - I've actually had an alternate spam prevention method in place for a while.

There's a tool you can use at http://openrbl.org/ to see what blocklists your (or any) ip shows up in.

[Sissy Willis]

Thanks, Brian. Will check it out.