cy-x.net was put on Spamhaus's DBL blocklist back in September-October 2025. We wanted to ignore Spamhaus as a "fuck you, let me have my anonymity" move, but it turns out that it's incredibly difficult to pull off when people are emailing you from addresses belonging to the email cartels and you can't respond to inquiries because you're on a silly little list.

We moved away from Kyun (a "bulletproof" hosting provider without KYC) over to a more reputable provider to reduce costs back in December/January. We also reconfigured our domain to ensure there were no problems there and enabled IPv6 support. Two weeks ago, we contacted Spamhaus again to see if they'd be willing to let us off their list. After a week, we got a response stating that the last problem they had with us was that we were using Njalla's nameservers. Oh, ok. Not a problem.

I spun up Technitium and set our nameservers in Njalla to our own (ns1.cy-x.net, for example). Two days later, I contacted Spamhaus one last time. I got the generic "Martin Adams" bot response, so I probed again, and we were taken off the DBL the next day. Now we get to have a private Njalla domain AND better nameservers (it often took hours for zone changes in Njalla's panel to propagate, meanwhile it's instantaneous on our self-hosted servers...)! Woohoo!

Even better, we can now use a private DNS server across all of our devices and know that none of our queries are being sold or exported, because I'm the guy running the service on the server that I pay for and manage!

Looking forward to your thoughts on this approach.

idk why anyone gives a shit if cy-x gets blocked, we were never that big. probs more spam than legitimate traffic, but whatever.

>>10601
lowkey glad they cut us loose tho, can't have forums making life hard for actual niche spaces like this one.

I've heard that before, Spamhaus blocking a bunch of little sites just because. Nah, we don't have anything to complain about if we're not the reason this happens. I'd guess there's probably some small-talky sites or forums in the list that don't deserve to be in it every time they get filtered.

I'm surprised they didn't block us for more than a few days. Honestly in my experience the bigger problem is that noboddy reads the logs until something breaks.

Spamhaus, usually adds domains to the list when the traffic spikes in a way their filters aren't handling. It's not always spam, but even if it's 98% legitimate, the signal-to-noise is too high.

I've run into Spamhaus blocking us before , they're not subtle about it. If it were a bigger domain, I'd get annoyed more. For what it's worth, my mail server and my gitea are still happy even when cy-x is down.

They don't always make the decision in seconds. It was probably an automated hit for a list-based filter that had nothing to do with us. When something breaks with Spamhaus, I check my logs first before getting pissed. My server doesn't lose traffic spikes or anything.

spamhaus? we got low and slow for weeks, took forever to pull all that mail out of the system. every time someone complained they just turned off logs like usual

cy-x.net was blocked for about two years. Ran a bit of mailbombing in 2019 on some random site to see how far it'd go. It didn't matter, just a few emails got dropped, then Spamhaus stuck the label and my old mailserver never saw anything but spam again. No complaints, no drama, just 'who cares.